


Me & Michael

by spookylives



Series: Knowing my monster: a transformative twist on evil endings. [1]
Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game), Friday the 13th Series (Movies), Halloween (1978), Halloween Movies - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-26
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2019-08-29 18:01:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16748962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookylives/pseuds/spookylives
Summary: Jason’s summer camp has become a pleasant, quiet place. Though one autumn, when the eighties are still a new decade, a mysterious shape appears in the woods of Camp Crystal Lake. It is a man, but does not behave like one. Jason has no choice but to investigate the curious thing the nurses call Michael.Mature for extreme violence.





	1. The Shape in the Woods.

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve never posted a fan fiction before. I’ve written them for years but they’ve never come to surface. Strange how these things happen. - Spooky

### Chapter One: The Shape in the Woods. 

For Jason, life was a series of categories with no labeling system. He could tell in confidence what creatures were from nature and not. The birds were a particular favorite. The large ones, especially the black, were noisy and territorial. But the smaller ones, the ones that hopped rather than strode, those were the ones who sung in the mornings and tucked their heads into their wings at night. He had the common knowledge that these subjects of the outside were different than those immobile objects that accompanied them. A doe was not the same thing as a pan or a walking stick. If it moved on its own volition it was something mother nature had made. Humans had a tendency to create objects that became useless once they weren't around to operate them. 

A car, for example, would sit and bake in the summer heat until the town sheriff came to place a written letter to move it. A deer at least, would munch on the autumn leaves and have the common sense to scamper off if you got close. His mother had told him once the purpose of a car, he had even ridden in one once or twice, but he found their existence another peculiar burden of human behavior. Why drive anywhere when you could just as easily walk? Why chain your tires in the winter when you could chance less sludge with a pair of snow boots? Perhaps he was too simpleminded, that's what everybody had said. He thought in terms too broadly, took sayings and concepts much too literally and to the heart. He wondered what his counselors would say if he told him that he knew the car haphazardly crashed mile or so from camp was a rare breed of its kind. He knew the dinky type of vehicle a local would drive. They were almost always earth-toned, the paint chipping and the bed pooled with discarded soda cans. They were the simpleton's mode of transport, the kind of metal hicks heap together. 

_"They are trucks."_ His mother would say. He would laugh, repeat the word and she would give him a candy. The vehicle that now resided in a ditch just north from the camp's cabin grounds was no truck. It was heftier than a truck, the body stacked with windows that prevented one from looking either inside our out. It was all white with the exception of large dual tires that still spun at the idling engine. There were words on the side too, big black and bold. He knew the high steeple of an _H_ , a generous curve of an _e._

 _"This one is a van."_ His mother would say. He would copy her speech, accidentally say _damn_ and get two floggings over the wrist. He had been patrolling the camp when he had heard it, mosing around the team leader quarters that still housed some interesting baseball cards. It was a terrible sound, the kind of which is both high pitched and guttural at the same time. It was metal crunching, a tree groaning with the onslaught of unfair weight. He had stalled at first, lurking from the window with a woodsman's ax in one hand. It had been early morning, still late enough that the sun hadn't made the sky blush on the horizon. When he finally had the reason to investigate, he had half a mind not to go. 

**_Afraid._** He felt afraid.  


Not of any form of retaliation. He could stand most anything just so long as his body could stay intact. But his current state allowed no progress for healing. If a shot gun would blast in his chest, the round and the wound it left would stay there for eternity. He felt no pain but he felt the empty space of torn muscle and punctured bone. He would argue that was worse, that hollow feeling. He was suspended in this form, never growing hair or peeling skin. _Just stuck there._ No regenerative change or degradation. Just _him._ Jason and all his countless flaws. The flaws everyone seemed so keen on pointing out in childhood. His later years had made him quite the home body. While he would usually jump on any form of intruder, he had found their kind had gotten more advanced as time marched on. They were so partial to guns these days, so quick to gang up and fester like ants on a dropped picnic cookie. When he did start his investigation, it was mother who prompted him.

_"You're being lazy, Jason! Do you want them back here on our camp! Take care of them now and dont you come back without their heads, I swear it!"_

Approaching from the North, he already had a vague idea what had happened. The driver was careless and hadn't taken account of the change in terrain. _The non-locals rarely do._ By the looks of things, the driver wanted to make it up the mountains but a proud oak had gotten in the way. The front of the car pinched inwards like an old man's chin, the taillights and grill popped outward like some scene in a _Looney Tunes_ skit. The blaring noise of a car horn became deafening. Jason opened the driver's side, ripped it off its hinges and threw out the body that was pressed up against the steering wheel. A man. It was a man in all white with a nice hair cut. A curious visitor to his camp but he was dead none the less. His nose was twisted to the side, his eyes glued shut by copious amounts of blood spilling from the forehead. A woman screamed and the passenger door swung open. 

"--oh please!!! Oh please!!!"

Why do they always beg? It's not like it will make a difference. The woman, who appeared to be a nurse, fell right out into the autumn leaves.

"JEFFEREY! JEFF! _OH GOD!_ JEFF!" 

Jason felt agitation, sauntered over to the woman as if she were the garbage bag his mother had told him to take out. 

"Oh god, _please!_ You have to help us---oh god, please! He's awake !! Call--" 

She did not get the chance to finish. Jason had already grabbed her by her throat, lifted her high over his head and sliced her belly open. Her entrails fell out like silly string from the can. They steamed from the cold winter air, piling in a wet and satisfying plunk ! Jason watched her as she gawked, her eyes the size of mother's fine China plates. A tingle of pleasure made its way down Jason's spine. Not for the kill per se, but the silence there after. That quiet _ping!_ right after death was a feeling no amounts of sweets or maternal high praise could recreate. 

"Michael---mic--"

Jason dropped the corpse, feeling satisfied that his chores for the day were short. Before he turned, someone had hit him over the shoulder with something hard and metallic. It scared him more so than anything. He turned, axe still in hand and **_swung._** This one was smart, he ducked before Jason could hit him. Spry, clever thing, he made it for the woods. In his white uniform, he looked like a picture Jason had seen in a picturebook of a white house on a foggy day. And when the man went out, Jason could just barely register a long string of blood over his shoulder. It ruined his nice dress shirt. _His mother will be furious with him._ The arm didnt move with him either, it dragged behind like a beaten dog. _Not Jason's work._ He hadn't touched the rabbit-footed one. But who had? 

As Jason set one foot over the other, he had all intentions of catching the hare. But a peculiar whistling noise had stopped him. He had heard it once before. When his mother would make her tea in the morning, the kettle would scream just as vindictively. He hated it then and he hated it now. Enraged, he forcefully opened the doors of the van's back, once again taking doors off hinges. When he did, a can of some curious substance shot out and nearly hit him clear in the chest. A breathing mask followed, spinning out onto the ground and dancing with the fallen leaves as it did so.

But that wasn't what transfixed his attention.

 

What he was looking at was a pair of large boots resting on top of a curious metal looking structure. Atop them were a pair of blue cutoffs, a worker's uniform that was worn and dirty. Large leather straps bound the body to the bed, a thin IV stand toppled over the chest with the contents still dripping. Hair, a gracious amount, splayed over a bruised jawline. The face was turned away so the eyes, nose and everything else were not visible. Only the hair. Sandy, but not brown. Not blonde either. Like squirrel's fur. _Sleeping._ He thought. Like the princess in the story, the one whose prince woke her up with a kiss. His mother made a real racket when she learned that her boy had been read a story about kissing. The other children hated him for getting story time canceled. A part of him wondered if that had anything to do with his demise. He had never seen a sleeping form since then now that he thought about it. His hand went to the metal bar of the bed frame, pulled it over with enough strength to get out in its entirety. He wasnt planning that those big, workman boots would connect with his face though.

 

For a moment Jason swore that it hurt. He heard a cracking noise, but to his relief it was not bone, just the plastic base of his mask. The snapping sound he heard before was the destruction of those three leather straps that held the body down. By force of gravity Jason went backwards, straight on his back. 

Lying there dazed, Jason was just barely able to register that the sky was now a light blue. The stars were gone too, so were his wits. He couldn't remember the last time he had been knocked on his bottom. Much less by a simple kick. By asumption, he thought it incapable. When he sat up, he did so slowly as to get his bearings. When he did, he was surprised to find that there was no human standing at the van's entrance. The most peculiar white face had taken place of a man's. It was deathly pale, expressionless with faux hair that stood up in every place. How peculiar it was to see this parody of a visage before him. A nose, a mouth pressed downward in a pensive yet careless sort of frown. It reminded him of a grown-ups face, a look that says you have done something wrong. A mask, obviously. Its owner now stood outside the vechile, feet apart and fists clenched. His arm, the one that held the IV, still had the sleeve rolled up to the bicep. Blood flowed down to the finger tips where a syringe tightened in the palms.

The shape’s head tilted.


	2. First Impressions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd hate to beat you over the head, humble reader. But while reading I would like you to entertain the literary concept of the unreliable narrator. Chapters told in the perspective of Michael won't deal with subjects known by Jason and vice versa. Off you go.

### First Impressions: The Groundskeeper & His Guest.

Michael could be the perfect patient when he wanted to be. He would be so bold as to take the medication they placed in front of him and sit passively during the seminars with whatever session Doctor Loomis had sprung on him. He would not get in fights, never protest mandated hours, and would even brush his own teeth and spoon his own soup. The point was he was horrifically functional, painfully aloof to any and everyone who so much as gave him the sanctity of their attention. Dr. Lommis once prescribed the possibility of some affected injury that was never reported. He somehow thought in that manic, aging brain of his that Michael had sustained some misplaced injury that had forced him into this forever muteness that made him the best loonie to ever grace the sanitarium.

He wanted to laugh when he heard that. The drive to was somewhere in the back of his mind, crying to break free like arms flailing while drowning. But the action, the action was lost somewhere in the connection from mind to body. It was like he would personally lose interest by the time his physical self registered there was an emotion to perform, his brain mulling over the possibility of his response while his body provided mere vacancy.

_Six bullets._

He had been shot six times by his beloved psychiatrist. He felt the pain but that curious sensation of disconnect had disrupted any kind of reaction to it. Even Michael, in all his silent grandeur and prideful stature, considered staying down when he was thrown down that balcony. Lying there, gazing up at those Halloween stars blurred irrelevant by the city, was quite possibly the most lucid he had ever felt. He had half a mind to stay there, to wait patiently for hands that would force him back in his cell. Wait for the pinprick of some syringe in his veins, the haze of induced sleep. For that childlike impulse to behave never truly goes away when one spends a childhood in a padded prison. It is much better to lie and submit than toil and struggle. But years in his cell, years of sitting and behaving and waiting, had made him crave much grander stimulation.

He wanted to _hurt_ . Personally, metaphysically, interpersonally. Any of those dapper buzz words Loomis had shoved off on him. It did not matter what kind of hurt it was. So long as someone was feeling some sort of pain than the point was moot. _Pain was entertaining for Michael_. It was something other than that bland and vacant nothingness that was everyday existence. The pain he felt then was something invigorating in its own way. Like stepping into a hot bath that burns the skin. The shock was initially terrible but the ease into was something like bliss. It rolled into the muscles, shocked the bones with an electric zing.

By the time they had finally caught up with him, Michael had already killed more than a baker’s dozen. They had all been necessary time placers till he could figure out where all those ambulances had taken Laurie. He should have known they would have the common sense to barricade the hospital she was staying at. Or even worse that Loomis would be there personally to flag down every blue suit in Haddonfield to make sure Michael stayed down. When they caught him in that hallway, when they hauled him off with their fancy non-lethal tricks and gizmos, he felt more disappointed than angry. Michael didn’t get angry. Not even mildly annoyed, really. Just complacent. Vigilant, but reserved. If _good patient Michael_ was an old suit, he had put it on again for his incarceration.

Not that it mattered. He was unconscious before he could ever wonder if he was at the right hospital. Loomis had done well to convince his colleagues that Michael Myers was the devil incarnate. After some frantic patchwork, they had him under enough anesthesia to make a racehorse comatose. Ketamine, in fact, a special import from Germany Loomis had been saving for just the occasion. If he were conscious to hear it, Michael would know that Laurie would be entering a witness protection agency in under twenty-four hours. She and her family would no doubt move elsewhere, but Michael had proved himself as an irregular case.

Ideally, he would be placed back in Smith’s Grove, but his escape had no doubt earned the asylum a black mark. It would be shut down two years later, immortalized by graffiti artists who would scare children with tales of Michael lurking in the basement.  If he weren’t nearly dead via sedation, Michael would know that he was being transported to a high-end security prison that was stationed at the tip-top of the Kittatinny. A prison for Michael. Not a sanitarium. No nurses or secluded psychiatric sessions but a high-end, gun-toting barbed wire kind of place. The best in the country.

Lucky for him, his driver was more concerned that his girlfriend took polaroids of their trip to drop off Illinois’ biggest nutcase. Little did he know that as he bragged about telling this to his grandchildren, he would never get the chance to have them. By the time the car crashed, the IV had dislodged itself and Michael’s almost superhuman regenerative abilities kicked up. The technician already had a syringe in his shoulder by the time the campground's owner gathered the courage to see what happened.

                                                                                          **-   X   -**

The last thing Michael knew, it was Halloween. Halloween, the most beloved time of the year. A time when he could be as unapologetically strange as he liked to be. That’s how it used to be at least, his fondest memories coming from the few Halloween nights he had been old enough to partake in festivities. So when he saw the large man decked out in his ruined clothes and hockey mask, he thought nothing of it. In his mind, this was another one of Haddonfield’s worst, out getting his jollies on a holiday that was once sacred. Boldly he stepped forward, his stride hardly showcasing the fog rolling into his brain. _So he wasn’t as impervious as he thought he was._ Fourteen hours under heavy anesthesia would thwart even the boogeyman. The eyes of this man’s hockey mask looked like they were opening up like dying stars eclipsed to black holes. The whole woods looked like a collapsing galaxy now that he thought about it, the orange, yellows, and browns of the leaves blending together like mixed swatches on a palette.

Hockey Puck didn’t seem to notice. He remained on his guard, slowly scooting backward to reach for the ax that leaped out of his hand. Now, Michael was resilient, even sometimes mad, but he was not stupid. Common sense told him that his tiny, medical grade chickenpox syringe would pale in comparison to an ax. Not to mention he felt as if the world had been placed into a giant sinkhole, the soles of his feet rushing forward yet back as if they stood on the shore tide. _Oh, but the_ **_impulse._ **The need to maim, to hurt, to conquer. That was a hunger pain he had not the self-control to deny. Fight or flight said to run in the opposite direction, a feeling he had not felt since he had first plunged that kitchen knife in Judith’s ribcage. It was delightful in a way, the final rise on the carnival ride before the inevitable drop.

Hockey Puck hadn’t the time to scamper for his defense tool. Michael was on him like a great white on chum, the syringe spurting out remnants of the technician's blood. His opponent, while clearly dazed, was hardly as submissive as his last. He fought. Quite viciously, in fact. His hands went up not in some silly defensive wail but in hard, honest fists. They connected with Michael’s jaw, a sore spot that had already been assaulted by the technician more than once. But Myers had long smelt blood in the water. He was eager, almost starving to have a repeat of his time in Haddonfield. The syringe went violently into the flesh. Once in the arm, the forefront to be exact. Three times somewhere on the neck, five in the chest. _But the bastard just wouldn’t die._

By the time Michael had made up his mind that a nice stab through the eyes would do the trick, he found himself feeling weightless again. And by Jove, it wasn’t the drugs, though they gave him the impression of flying. He was actually lifted off his feet and thrown straight into the front face of another oak. Michael saw stars, his head going from foggy to a vindictive hurricane. Subconsciously, he thought it justified treatment since he had gone about this so recklessly. But with a track record like his, who was he to assume Hercules had a cabin in the woods? While his ears were still ringing, Hockey Puck was back up again. His mask had some notable damage from the scuffle and from a jagged piece of ruined plastic, Michael could just catch the snarl of upturned lips. Teeth, mismatched and jutted were turned visible from a previous injury. Bone, high on the place where the cheek once had been, peaked formidably above dead skin.

There was no luxury to look further. Hockey Puck came _and he came in swinging._ With his ax in tow, he aimed for Michael’s head, but the shape was just quick enough to get back on his feet and grab Hercules by his forearm. They struggled for a bit, Hockey Puck’s wide, yellow-tinted eyes barring down into Michael’s as if they had the power to shoot beams of light. Michael had the bright idea to kick him in the gut, but his saving grace came from an unlikely source. 

_Bang._

Michael knew that sound. A shotgun. The hefty kind that snapped back when a casing was spent. They were the kind the bad guys would carry in all the Bond movies, burly things that required two hands to hold. They had them when they took him into custody and they had them when they attempted to move him to a different facility. This particular one had the power to go through flesh and bone. It had managed to get Hockey Puck, fortunately, who had a large gaping hole right in the forearm where the bullet had passed through. Michael waited for the inevitable scream that would follow such an injury, the automatic recoil of a man delirious with pain. Hockey Puck made no such distinction though. He stared at the gaping wound as if it had happened to someone else. He almost seemed disinterested, that half-lidded eye giving him a sort of careless gaunt about him.  The two of them stood for a moment, half dazed and staring before inevitably looking for the source. Michael let go of the ax.

 

“--Mic-- **_Michael!_ **Bastard!”

 

Now, he knew that voice from somewhere. If he had cared to recall this was one of his carers tasked with moving him. Based on the twisted nose, the pool of blood from the forehead and the nasally almost destroyed vocal volume, common sense said he had been driving upon the accident. _Jacob, Jared, Jason._ Something of that nature. He wasn’t wearing a name tag. Michael quickly attempted to regain his barrings, this new assailant looked like he was a figure in a painting. Blurred by drugs. Whoever he was, he aimed the gun again, popped a second shell.

 

 **“--** don’t you---don’t you fucking move **!”**

 

There was an impulse to laugh at how ridiculous this man sounded with a broken nose but all parties remained composed. Michael moved only his eyes, hands slowly returning to his side. It was only then that one could see that he held some form of device in his right hand. The driver clicked it on, pressed it to his lips that looked like they were surrounded by a beard of blood.

 

 **_“--1042--1042_ **\--subject escaped. Cunningham county. Trailing officers---”  

 

Hockey Puck, who had finally let his rage germinate to a fine sprout, made his move toward him.

 

 **“--don’t you fucking** **_dare_ ** **!”**

 

One shot was fired. Two when _Jacob, Jared, Jason or whoever_ realized Hockey Puck did not give a damn about bullets. Three when the last one was shot out as it hit the ground. What followed was nothing more than a rage-fueled frenzy. Hockey Puck grabbed the man and hoisted him high over his head. His hands, nearly wrapped thrice around the neck, bulged with extradited pressure. The driver’s face instantly turned the kind of red only Pomegranates should have, his eyes popping cartoonishly out of his skull as spittle flew from a splayed open jaw. Hockey Puck shook with a tremor as vicious as a mighty earthquake, juxtaposing the floundering creature with the motion that made his neck snap. He continued even when the skin turned purple.

 _1042\. Cummingham County._ That could only mean one thing. _Reinforcements._ More guns. More ammunition to worry about and more of that damned sleep agent. Michael liked to think himself invincible but he knew damn well that incarceration was imminent once the arterially came around. They would sweep the place like they had Halloween night at Haddonfield and it would only take a few choice guesses to figure out which route they had taken to get to the mountains. Michael thought of going back to his deathly clean room, the window that showed a basic green courtyard with no fence. He thought of Laurie asleep in a hospital bed, pleased with the assumption that boogeyman was locked away for good.

When Hockey Puck threw that mangled corpse back toward the equally destroyed car, the shape had already disappeared between the trees.  


	3. Down from the mountains.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wonder how much academic writing has ruined me. I can write for hours but still find myself worrying over things like point and main argument, sentence flow and the like. This piece has been a welcomed reprieve but I hope you don't find any of that silly structuralism here. There is a time and place for University style writing, after all.

### Down from the mountains: A Dose of New Jersey Hospitality. 

Jason wondered what it was he had done wrong. In childhood, he was only punished if he wandered too far from what was expected of him. If he stole an extra cookie during lunchtime, if he spoke too loudly during church services or sung off-key, there were certainly repercussions. Other children were wild and of poor manners, Jason was meant to be their prodigal example. While he thought his mother far from cruel, she kept a worn old yardstick in the back shed from her attempted career as a school teacher. Ever obedient and never questioning, he’d rest his hands over a kitchen table and watch as his knuckles turned red after two strikes. It was painful and happened rarely, but he would effectively be convinced to never repeat whatever action soured her fancy.

It was this reason that he couldn’t fathom why he had been so clearly punished that morning. Camp Crystal Lake was his domain. He had kept to his personal property, leaving the entire universe outside to its own devices. The camp was a gift from his mother, a duty she had placed upon him to make sure that no child would suffer as her son did. In these later years, he had come to think of the grounds as cursed land. Perhaps there was some vindictive spirit cursing the camp, a vicious hungry ghost that turned every event into misfortune. Whatever it was that made this place so evil, fate had made it his home. He had been here both before and after death, most likely doomed to remain until the sun lost its light. Everyone who came here, everyone whoever would, were intruders and deserved what they got. This white-faced monster and his friends were just the same, raiders who obliterated both his person and property.

_And the monster._ Twice they had called it  _ Michael  _ but Jason had a hard time believing that was its true name. Michael, at least from the teachings and stories from his mother, had been an angel. He was a protector and a scholar, a bright and shining light amongst the war against the devil. This Michael, the one who wore a mask, was certainly not the one from his mother’s bible. Jason wasn’t even sure if it was a man. Michael was  **_terrifying._ ** He seemed to feel no pain, he hardly even seemed to need to breathe let alone worry over any injuries. He reminded him of the porcelain dolls his mother had collected from girlhood. They too were pale-faced and blue-eyed, staring vacantly out towards bookshelves and blank walls as if indifferent to his presence. When he lifted them from their stands, when he accidentally dropped them on their fragile faces or pulled too strongly on their dainty hands, at least he could say he was punished for hurting them first. Michael had needed no such prompting, he had punished Jason on sight. _Like it was fun._

And it certainly felt like punishment. There was no pain, of course, but he was horrifically aware of every place Michael had stuck in his syringe. The vacancy was there, the torn flesh and intricacies where the needle destroyed the dead muscle. And the blood. It ran thick and black from his injuries, only stopping when it dried over and formed a makeshift scab. These wounds paled in comparison to the one left by the shotgun. There was no way to fix that one, it leaked and gaped without any sign of remedy. He tied an old shirt around it, halfway thankful that he no longer had to worry about trivial infections. This hole, this horrible vacancy, was now a part of him. Just like the cut over his cheek that exposed the gums and the cavity that blew through his hip where a fence pole had been stuck in. This new injury on his arm would commemorate his last victim. The other needle points would memorialize Michael, making him impossible to forget.

And how he wished he could forget Michael. A part of him looked forward to killing him just to annihilate the threat of more harm. But when he turned to find him gone, Jason realized Michael was a problem not easily solved. The part of his psyche that was still childlike told him that he had disappeared like the ghost he so clearly resembled. Maybe he _did_ disappear with the air, choosing to lurk in some other unfortunate part of the country to demonstrate his curse. Maybe he was the ghost that haunted the camp manifested. While the hours that followed the main event did not reveal Michael, they did manage to turn up some of the people looking for him. On the outskirts of camp, right where the town ended and Crystal Lake began, he spotted two officers in blue. They stood with cowboy hats and aviators, looking more like twins than coworkers. One twiddled his cigarette as he spoke, the smoke bouncing up and down as he did so. For a moment, Jason reverted back to the mental state of a child. His mother always said that if he were ever in trouble, a police officer would be his best friend. How luxurious it would be to pass this  _ Michael _ problem off to someone less capable. They would have guns at least, maybe even some of those fancy big tanks he had seen in the comic books. They would need an army to take down Michael, and Jason had no interest in being drafted. He even went as far as to step out from his place in the trees.

“ _ Jason!”   _ His Mother's voice called, but from where he could not tell. “ _ What do you think you're doing!?” _

 

Still trapped in that facade of a child, Jason withdrew, his chin dipping and eyes lowering.

 

“ _ Have you learned nothing, boy? You know what their kind does. They shoot on sight! Pigs. That's what they are, Jason and you are to gut them like the miserable swine they are! Understand?” _

 

No, he did  **_not_ ** understand. He did not understand how any of this could have happened. How could the universe, with all its peculiar punishments, add Michael to his concentration of problems? He already had a time keeping the grounds free of filthy counselors, why was it now his duty to exercise a devil? Jason hesitated, his weight teetering on the tips of his toes. He halfway hoped this would be the time that Michael would solidify in the air. Hungry for mortal blood, he would look to take these victims for a sacrifice. Then, if either of them had not shot him first, Jason could come up from behind and behead him. He'd take the head back like Perseus with Medusa, placing it in the hollow of a tree to ward off any other evil spirits that sought to come there. Jason crouched to his knees.

 

“---why would he hide here? This ain't nothin’ but the sticks.” Said the cigar cop, his fine boots crunching on leaves. As they drew closer inward, Jason gripped his machete. From the corner of his eye, he caught the glint of a pistol. 

 

“Freaks like the woods.” The other responded. “Calms them down. Makes them feel all one with nature and free.”

 

“Is that why he changed up the mask? The guy they caught running down the highway said he ain't seen a William Shatner mask. Said it was a hockey one, the kind with holes and shit. Imagine that, Myers making a costume change before nearly choppin’ that boy's arm off.” 

 

“I'm glad you find this funny.” 

 

“I find it funny that this is about the umpteenth time this psycho has got outta dodge. Takin’ a fucker from one nuthouse to the next. Should put a bullet in ‘em.” 

 

“They don't consider the death penalty where he’s from.” 

 

“Ain't my point.” 

 

Jason slowly rose but stopped when he heard the telltale static of a walkie-talkie coming in from radio waves. 

 

“  _ Vehicle located. Collision. Two casualties. One female, impaled. One Male, asphyxiation. Further investiga-”  _

 

The call phased out with an abrupt cut, the kind that comes from the thumb being taken off the button. 

 

“What the hell?” Said the smoking cop.    
  


“Guess that proves it. Our man’s in the woods.” His contemporary added. “We should block this place off. Use the tape.” 

 

Jason wondered why it took them this long to think of that. His afterlife would have been so much more easier if they would have taped this camp up years before. Nonetheless, he watched them work like ants moving grain up a steep hill. When they were done, they stood shoulder to shoulder, turning to bring a cigarette to a lighter. Their heads were bashed together with enough velocity to make a sickening crack. When Jason left them, he noted how the mess they made looked like the streamers hanging from the rafters of a birthday party. 

 

**\- X -**

 

By the time the sun had set and the temperature had dropped, Jason had found and murdered three police officers. It was like some elaborate game of whack-a-mole, he had no idea where to find them but when he did, he struck them down as hard and as quickly as possible. To think only this morning his camp was a quiet place, the organization of a few baseball cards his only worry. Now the woods stunk of an overwhelming presence, you could not walk two steps front or back without having the impression that you were being watched. Even worse, the trees seemed ominous now. Autumn had stripped many of them of their leaves so they looked like large disembodied claws griping towards the sky. Jason felt like they were somehow conspiring against him, that they were keeping Michael well hidden and telling him where to find Jason.

Even the sky seemed particularly traitorous, thick clouds began to blight out the country stars despite not being there that morning. There was a light drizzle somewhere between the evening and early midnight, a pitter-patter that grew stronger with each passing hour. Jason had no physical reason to sleep or rest, but he had no desire to get wet. It reminded him too much of the sensation of drowning and his clothes would become heavy and cumbersome. When it was a moonless night like this and the camp went pitch, he liked to light a fire in the old mess hall. There, amongst rows of dusty tables and benches, he would watch the embers crackle and spit until the sun replaced his light source in the morning. It felt nice pretending he was still a camper, he would sometimes even hold out a discarded stick as if it held a marshmallow. Sometimes, when she was feeling up to it, mother would tell him a story.

He was on his way to do that when he found a stray detective. The rain had already started to pumble and Jason’s mind had already drifted to gooey marshmallows and the smell of smoke. Perhaps that was why he hated this drifter more than the others. He reminded him of all the work still to be done, he forced him to recall his horrible morning and equally horrible predicament.  _ He reminded him about the existence of Michael. _

 

“--who--who’s there!?!”  The detective spun around with a flashlight in hand, the rays bouncing up and down as his hands shook. Through the light, one could just catch the rainfall in harsh, quick lines. They looked like pin-needles falling every which way. Jason, having quickly grown bored of his chores, stepped heavily in the mud. 

 

“--Mi-Michael! Michael! Mic--” He brought the walkie-talkie to his lips, it beeped for a second but slipped in the wetness of the rain. Before this, Jason had taken note how small this officer was. His hat looked two sizes too big for him, his badged rain jacket looking more like a tied over garbage bag. Now that Jason had heard his voice, all notice of the man’s inferiority paled in comparison to his rage. 

 

_ “ He thinks you’re Michael? My boy? You’d confuse him with that brute?  Correct him, Jason. Show him you’re no coward hiding in the trees! Show him you’re no Michael Myers!” _

 

Jason fully obliged his mother, walking calmly toward the officer who had already raised his pistol. With one quick stride and a jab, Jason had skewered him on the end of his machete. The noise he made was like a car’s dying engine, his eyes rolling in the back of his head and mouth gasping. To admire his suffering, Jason lifted his weapon higher so that the creature would slide down towards the knife's hilt. Smugly, he took note at how long it was taking this one to die. Blood traveled down Jason’s arm, soaking his makeshift bandage with its vindictive red. _He almost felt repulsed._ As the officer’s body went into shock, his flashlight was discarded and tumbled toward the earth. When it fell, it cast a light down towards the receding pathway and revealed a small sector of space. 

A face, hauntingly white and inscrutable, shown back. The hair, once so stringy and wild, now laid slick back against the rubber scalp. _Jason froze._ With his detective shishkabob, he had little time to maneuver his weapon if Michael just so happened to decide he would sprint to him. Nonetheless, he made his efforts to free his machete from the officer’s chest cavity, throwing the body down with enough vigor to release the death rattles from the throat. Michael moved closer, his pace fluid and eerily calm

_Closer. Five feet away._

_How could such a tiny, unimpressive body hold this much force?_ Jason struggled some more, using all the strength in his bicep.

_Even closer. Three feet away._

Jason brought his boot down onto the man’s groin and pulled.

_ Two feet away. _

With one last pull and a guttural breaking sound, his knife was free. Jason raised it high over his head, just in time for Michael to bridge the space between them. That blood-soaked t-shirt fell off of his arm, catching on the back of his jacket and held there by the wetness of rain. Right when Jason’s brain had communicated with his body that it was time to swing, something made him stop. Michael stood right up in front of him, nearly an arm’s length away. There was no fear in his stance, no sense of muscle tension or trepidation in his step. He just simply stood there, eyes lidded in a glower due to the fact that he held his head up high. Through the windows of the mask, Jason could just barely see his eyes. Horrifically blue, like the doll’s eyes.

Jason hesitated, looked down and noticed Michael seemed to have brought something with him. It took two hands to hold, but he kept it there in a strong, vice-like grip. Jason, with his arms still raised, looked down to it and then back to Michael. He imagined it to be some carved out heart of one of the police officers. Something macabre, villainous and completely spiteful. Confused, and feeling quite panic-stricken, Jason’s muscles flinched to bring the machete down. When Michael did not cower, when he stared at Jason with the disinterest of a cat looking down from a window sill, he found himself stalling. 

 

_ “Jason! What are you doing!? He is evil _ _!  _ _ He is sick! Defend yourself!”  _

 

Michael brought his hands out in front of him, clearly asking Jason to take whatever it was he was offering. 


	4. Shadowing the Giant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Such wonderful words of encouragement and kudos on this work! Thank you so much for being so kind and lifting my spirits. Progress for this chapter was slow due to some real-life contradictions but it arrives anyway. Thanks again.

 

### Stalking the giant: A hunger grows.

When he was young, Michael had loved books. Not for the ridiculous reasons Loomis thought he did. He had no submissive pleasure in reading the kinds of books librarians band from the shelves, he had never been granted access. He liked books because the people in them were like the words that held them. They held no secrets, there were no dreary ulterior motives that came after years of a short-stick relationship. You knew who thought what, what they wanted, where their goals would lead and where their thoughts ended and action started.  People, at least everyone he had ever meant, were not as generous in their keep. If you stand before even your oldest friend, your own mother even, there is nothing stopping her from striking you hard across the face. You would sit there dumbstruck, holding you wounded cheek and ask her why. Maybe she would surprise you further and tell you that your house had burnt down or she was fucking the plumber. Perhaps that’s what Michael detested most about people. _They had too many possibilities_ , too many turns or steps they could take.

Michael had no _concrete_ reason for what he did. If he had to write it, create it a list, he’d find himself at a loss.  But Dr. Loomis had certainly worked to get it out of him, but even the renowned psychiatrist would find that his time was better spent elsewhere. Contrary to popular belief, Michael _had_ spoken to Loomis. Twice, actually. The first was when he had been there for only six months. The good doctor had been grilling him on some particularly pointless test. It involved matching the current facial patterns with events such as a butterfly caught in a spider’s web, a baby in the middle of a wail. He hadn’t touched the cards, merely stared outwards, looked at the clock and asked when lunch time was. Loomis noted that the only time Michael seemed to ever be concerned about anything was when he felt his stomach was empty. Two years later, when Michael had apparently failed the silly visual tests and the MRIs held nothing substantial, Loomis finally decided upon a more practical approach. He asked Michael _why. Why Judith? Why Halloween? Why the kitchen knife?_ And for a good hour, they continued their rapport of silence and upended questions. However, Michael had found himself tested, and bored with the repetition.

 “--she was _there_.”

Such simple words but Loomis acted like they were satan’s prophecy, some biblical revelation his mother would gawk about. He couldn’t understand why though. He had given the mad man what he wanted. He spoke, he answered and even kept his head off the desk in front of him. It was the truth after all. Michael’s father had told Loomis in confidence that he was surprised it wasn’t his wife who had died that night. He never hated his mother _per se_ he just felt a strong and vindictive _nothing_ towards her. Her and her prattling and her fussing and her gossip. She was like a great big vacuum with no off-switch. She’d suck the air out of a room, her pink-stained lips moving a mile a minute. Judith, who was her youthful identical, had simply been at the right place at the right time. Her worst offense was her voice, the nasally and naggy way she’d say, _Michael._ She did it before she died too. Perhaps that’s why he stabbed her so many times.

But that was the real reason, she was simply _there._ People took up too much space, or worse, they made too much noise. What’s particularly horrible about a person is that they are always in motion. Their chest rises with each breath, their foot taps when you stare at them for too long. These motions, these little discrepancies, they make noise. You can hear the tapping of the linoleum beneath their toes, the sharp and noisy intake their nose makes when they suck in extra air. _Disgusting, really._ It made his skin crawl thinking about it, the thought of another human being standing before him _existing._ Dr. Loomis had said he wasn’t a human. Counting his feelings toward the race, he must have been right. Maybe he wasn’t a human, but he certainly wasn’t a demon. Those were the silly creatures in his mother's leather-bound bible, sometimes they smiled at him on Halloween masks and decorations, _but they were not him._ Michael was a shape, a corrosive nothingness that belonged to no genus or category. _Yes, he liked that best._

Whatever he was, _man, demon or shape,_ Michael couldn’t help feeling horrifically human now. Each step was heavy and dragged on for a near minute. The woods, while still endowed with the familiar reds and yellows of autumn, danced. They smeared and collected like the fat bubbles of a lava lamp, bouncing and moving with enough vigor to make him believe he had been tossed into a pool. He was reminded how much he vehemently loathed nature. In a neighborhood, you could hide behind most of anything. The neighbor’s dumpsters set out toward the curb, a min-van with darkened paint. A house was even better. Closets, tight corners, and kitchen counters did well to close the space between Michael and victim. The woods were a different story. Here there was wide open spaces, the only discrepancy the intervention of trees. He stopped, eyes switching from left to right with practiced dexterity.

 _Which way?_ Certainly not backward. That’s where that _thing_ was. That giant with the hockey mask and the iron will. Rarely did Michael ever find someone taller than him, even if it was only by mere inches. He had read once in a book about something about reflections being the most terrifying thing. Particularly speaking there was that old tale about a woman appearing in a mirror to bite the faces of her victims or _something like that._  The point was that one fears the things they see themselves in and he could see some modicum of himself in that giant. _Silent. A mask. A talent for strangulation and deadlifting?_ It was almost ominous. _Not frightening._ He would have to tell himself. _Ominous._

Even after that little mental prep, he found it difficult not to dwell on the fact that Hockey Puck wasn’t really like him at all. There was no breath from Hercules when he moved, no juxtaposition of muscles constricting or straining tendons. Hockey Puck moved more like the inner gears of an old clock. _Clumsy, grinding_ , but eerily efficient in the way all antiques are. You don’t know how they work so you just sit idly and watch until they inevitably die from overuse.  Michael, despite opposition from Loomis and the remaining Myers family, _was human._

While he was a lot more put together than most, he _did_ bleed and bruise. It never happened before, but breaking bones was a possibility. There was no titanium lining his skeleton. He imagined being ripped in half by that thing, or worse, dying out here due to some trivial thing like starvation. Perhaps Hockey Puck would be the lucky one to find his remains. He would stick his head on a stick a la _Lord of The Flies_ and parade about it like a new god. Yes, that’s how the simple folk lived. They worshiped disembodied heads and skinned their enemies for trophy pelts. Then they dried the skin out for jerky. The drugs must have made him eerily cautious because for once in his life, he felt like _he_ was the one being pursued.

Yes, it must have been the anesthesia. If it were any other situation, he would turn on his heel and bash Hockey Puck’s brains in with his bare hands. He found his thoughts drifting to that Chelsea grin beneath the hockey mask, the exposed gums, the dead skin. _A zombie? A ghost? A monster?_ His mind swam through the possibilities, mosing through supernatural creatures and possible explanations. He thought so hard on the subject he had to sit himself on the roots of a lone tree. Before he knew it, he was waking out from a drugged haze and the sun had traveled across the sky.

**\- X -**

 There were heavy deep blue rain clouds in the sky. Curious he could see them, he couldn’t recall laying on his back. There he was though, head suddenly clear enough to register the word _cloud_ and _rain_ in the same mental sentences. The sun was somewhere above those angry balls of steel wool, shining in all the despair and desuetude of a voice forced down into a whisper. He could smell that distinctive pang of coming rain too, the soft clean smell of linen and pine needle. A speck of rain flew from the sky and landed on the bridge of his nose. He couldn’t feel it of course but went to touch it anyway. A mask. He was still wearing a mask. Memories and realization of the predicament at hand came flooding back. It was then, after surveying the area and recognizing the scent of a burnt engine, he realized he was not too far off from the crash scene.

“--well ain’t this a shit show?” A voice said.

 

Another said something in Spanish. Something about the Virgin Mary.

 

“--Report. Sector 24-A. Myers has still not been located.”

 

There was no resounding click of a message being beaconed on the sound waves. There was static in its place, a lot of it.

 

“---still nothing?”

 

“ No, dumb ass. Me and the chief just scheduled brunch. What the fuck do you think?”  

 

Michael felt himself settle back into the leaves and the dirt. For a half a second, he considered drifting back off. Sleep had always been a favorite pastime. If he slept, people became less of a concern. Nothingness, the black hole of dreamless unconsciousness, it was the closest thing he could think of that would match the word _bliss_. He shut his eyes for a moment, listening to the officers a mere two feet away switch off between sets. He listened to the sudden angry whipping of trees, the lone and distant screeching of a raven three yards back.

 

_Kill. Maim. Destroy._

 

If he focused even harder, he could hear the soft reprieve of water lapping over a dirt shore.

 

_Kill. Maim. Destroy._

 

A leaf, freshly fallen from the tree above, scampered over his head and cartwheeled onto his chest.

 

_Kill. Maim. Destroy._

 

He was up, unnaturally quiet. Michael rose to his feet with enough dexterity to rival the homely panther. The officer brought his attention to the eviscerated nurse plopped under a tree and brought the receiver to his lips.

 

“ Vehicle located. Collision. Two casualties. One female, impaled. One Male, asphyxiation. Further investiga-”

 

It felt like child’s play bringing his hands around the man’s neck and pulling backward. The officer bowed back, kicking his feet wildly as they collapsed under him. His contemporary, clearly the more intelligent, bolted in the opposite direction. The distinctive sound of an airway snapping disjointed the death throws of struggled breathing. The officer, much to Michael’s impartial disappointment, had been lucky enough to die of a broken neck. Still no sign of the other pig though. _No matter, life is full of opportunities._ Michael felt no particular rush in catching up. _Those who run get tired, after all._ His new concern was the blood still gushing down his arm from where the i.v. had ripped out. Luckily, there were some medical bandages still in the ruined remains of the truck.

 

 **\- X -**  


With quite literally nothing better to do, Michael stalked his way towards the direction his little runaway had went. The wonderful thing about the woods was that it seemed keen on leaving impressions. Imprints were left in fresh mud and he could easily distinguish which were made by a man’s and which a passing fawn. Branches, bushes, even the occasional displaced track of leaves made it easy for him to tell a person had been there scrambling for an exit. It was fun in its own way, piecing clues and following leads like some seasoned detective. If this was the thrill his father got from hunting in the summer, he could finally understand the grandness of the great outdoors.

 

_Shink. Shink. Shink._

 

The sound was clean. The type of sound Loomis would play on a loop from a cassette tape to encourage a patient’s calm.

 

_Shink. Shink. Shink._

 

Michael lowered himself, wading through a field of bushes that bore reddish looking berries.

 

 _Shink. Shink. Shink_.

 

It did not take long for Michael to follow the source of that peculiar noise. Rounding the side of a redwood, he peered forward with a touch of disdain and annoyance. It was Hockey Puck, standing there in all his lumbering glory and destitution. He somehow looked larger to Michael, who was just now given the added advantage of seeing him against a normal sized person. Who he held there, juxtaposed against the tree was none other than Michael’s ever-elusive quick-footed detective, the one who went on about the sacred virgin. He would speak nothing more about Hail Marys now it would seem, for the bottom of his jaw was completely missing. The tongue lulled out from the back of the throat and down toward the chin like the pendulum of an old clock. Michael was sure he’d seen something like it in a cartoon.

The sound had been coming from the entering and reentering of a machete through the chest cavity. In and out the machete went, back and forth like the ends of a typewriter. There seemed to be no means to it. The man was certainly dead, but the brute kept stabbing him as if he didn’t believe it was so. While he seemed distracted, Michael thought to rise and prepared the syringe he had kept since their last meeting.

 

_And yet._

 

Hockey Puck stopped. With his machete still in the detective’s guts, he turned his attention elsewhere. He didn’t move. He instead stood with his head transfixed on some random, inconspicuous section of the land. An old stump that had been sawed down by an overzealous woodsman held Hercules’s attention. He stood there staring at it, his head lowering and shoulders going lax as if he were being scolded. No one was there, of course. No one besides the ghosts that moved the wind, carrying the autumn leaves in a swirl. It felt like eons, sitting there watching nothing in particular. Just a giant and his poltergeist, engaging in some telepathic conversation Michael wasn’t capable of partaking in. It was as fascinating as it was draining, as boring as it was bizarre. When Michael moved to end this spell of stagnation, Hockey Puck finally woke up.  He ripped his machete from the wood that lodged it behind his victim’s back and moved onwards. Almost as if he hadn’t been standing there for a good seven minutes talking to Casper. It infuriated Michael in a way, for in his mind most everything had a purpose. Perhaps it was this fury that inspired him to stalk this behemoth ever closer.

 

****-  X   -** **

 

There was a name for those like Hockey Puck in the sanitarium. _Drifters. Loners. The dodo birds._ You’d find them in mess halls with half-chewed mashed potatoes falling out their mouths, their eyes locked onto a clock they didn’t read. Maybe they’d be standing in the doorway of the last free stall, preventing you from a morning piss. Even worse, they’d howl at night or cry when their favorite nurse was excused for her lunch break. The point was they were simple creatures. Driven insane by a bad case of poor genes or an untimely break-in at home. They would talk to themselves, they would claim to see things and warn others of the eyes that watched but couldn’t see. Michael knew it was madness. Even then, when he couldn’t have been old enough to have a voice crack, _he knew what crazy looked like._

But Hockey Puck, as bizarre as it seemed to say, did not seem like the looney type. He did not twitch or foam, he didn’t even snarl. Instead, he was composed like some form of professional. His movements, while obviously slow due to some injury, were purposeful and he made quick due of two more officers with the ease of a well-trained hunter. Michael would be lying if he said he didn’t enjoy watching this man work. It was almost like watching a movie with all the horrible romance bits worked out. Even as a child, he only watched movies to watch someone get maimed. This felt like a special director’s cut, a one-man audience he was only privy to. Regardless of how much fun it was to ogle the giant, one pressing problem was starting to gnaw at the back of his mind. _How in the hell does one go about getting out of the woods?_

Surely it was a pressing issue, but Michael had the misfortune of owning a one track mind. It was why he was so talented in his pursuit of Laurie, why he was so dedicated to things like crosswords and puzzles in childhood. He liked focus, _craved it sometimes_ . But it was the onslaught of rain that brought him out of his newest fascination. It wet his back and made his clothes stick uncomfortably to his skin. Even worse, _he felt cold._ Terribly so and the clumsiness that came with that would be an issue if he were to ever make it out of this mess in one piece. To make matters worse, he’d be hungry soon too but he wasn’t above eating something raw if he could get ahold of it quick enough. Which was another peculiar thing about these woods. He had seen absolutely no wildlife. Not a bee, or a raccoon, or even a flocking crow.  Common sense told him that Hockey Puck couldn’t be the only thing inhabiting these woods, that was absurd. But the experience was beginning to tell him otherwise.

He had left Hockey Puck to his devices to find a deer, or a raccoon, or maybe even a stray dog but had found only fallen leaves and their equally barren trees. He couldn’t find the crash site now that he looked for it. Neither the bodies left by himself or Hockey Puck. _Oh, now this wasn’t good._  Then what would Loomis say when he found his prodigal patient had gone and died the woodsman’s death? He’d probably think the world had gotten some kind of blessing. The thought made Michael furious and he stabbed his syringe through a tree, finally breaking it. _Lovely._ Before he knew it, he was back with Hockey Puck but at a watchable distance. How strange it was that he found him of all things with little issue.

With no choice left but to wander, he let his mind do the same thing. He thought of his bed in the sanitarium, the mattress that had no support and the sheets that couldn’t even swaddle an infant. He knew of a man in there, the only person he could say he could respect. A man who ate only meat and had been incarcerated for eating the meat of his girlfriend’s thighs. In those days a child psychopath was new and frightening, others dare not touch him in fear of lengthening their sentence. It was this man who taught Michael the ropes of institution life, he who took pity on him and called him names like _boy_ and _son._

 

“ _You always look for the tender-headed ones._ ” He had said. “ _Those are the ones who will get you places and things. Watch em._ ”

 

He was right of course. For just that Summer Michael had somewhat befriended a looney who had but two fingers on one hand. In exchange for an extra cup of vanilla pudding, Michael would turn the pages of his leather bound bible an hour a day. He didn’t read it, Michael was too fast for him to do so, but he got the impression the man liked to give everyone the assumption that he was smart. Michael had learned for once in his life the art of fair trade, a lesson that was cut short when a thumbtack mysteriously winded up in that nice man’s soup. How strange it was that he died the next day. You’d think one would notice a thumbtack sliding down their esophagus. _Michael missed the extra pudding._

But regardless of tragic endings, Michael found himself in a similar predicament. Here he was in a new place, alone, hungry and running out of options. Here he could not hide in his bedroom or guilt the nurses into bringing him books or puzzles. Here, he was alone, and growing more vulnerable the harder the rain came down and the darker the sky turned. He didn’t want to die. Not with Laurie still living, and the prospect of doing it in the mud and the dirt felt unbecoming of someone who had such grand plans of murder. Yes, the situation was much the same so it had to have the same solution. Befriend the looney, find what he needs done and get rid of him once he’s fulfilled his purpose.

The tricky thing about Hockey Puck though was he was terribly efficient. He needed no extra hands to turn his pages, no sympathetic eyes or willing ears. He was quite literally in his element, and Michael had good reason to believe he was probably not in good favor. So he turned in the observations he had made that day, pinpointing to every motion he had observed and came to a conclusion. _His arm._ The one that now had a hole in it. Twice he saw him fumble with that ridiculous tourniquet, adjusting only to have it fall when he scalped a deputy. And here Michael was with some bandages that had certainly fulfilled their purpose, the bleeding had stopped hours ago.

The only thing left to do was find Hockey Puck, which was invariably simple because he never truly left him. Michael was undoubtedly good at stalking, and he followed close enough to watch Hockey Puck get through the chores of the day. He’d kill someone. Stare into the distance. Mark a tree with an X. _Wash rinse and repeat._ It was when he was particularly busy with a new victim that Michael found it was as good a time as any to intrude. It was humorous seeing hockey puck struggling with his knife, even more so when he rose his arms up to strike him. Michael, unimpressed, opened his hand to reveal a wad of slightly bloody gauze.  

 

 **-** **X -**

 For a moment, Hockey Puck stared at Michael as if he had grown a second head. He even backed away slightly, his raised machete wavering with an escaped sense of purpose. It seemed strange to Michael that someone as large and formidable as Hercules would be fearful, but he certainly wasn’t opposed to the idea. Fear was something he could work with, something that was manipulatable like soft clay. He pressed forward anyway, hands still outstretched with the mass of gauze slightly falling out. He even shook his fists, hoping that the purpose of his presence would become vilified. _It didn’t seem to be._ Hockey Puck looked as frigid as ever, even swinging that lumbering machete outwards when there was enough distance between them. Without meaning to, Hockey Puck tripped over a bunch of roots and landed on his ass a second time.

 

_Michael was amused._

 

Having been fully convinced that he had the upper hand in the situation, Michael pressed forward with the kind of purpose mules have on heavy cargo. He knelt down, knees nearly touching his chest, and stared at that behemoth of a man. He even pressed so close that the knife’s edge graced his shoulder, one large hack and he’d be missing a collarbone. _Do it._ Said the look in his eyes. _Do it and see what happens to you._ The giant pressed it ahead but applied no pressure, his bulbous and tortured eyes narrowing but tear-stricken with rain. It was then that Michael was given the great pleasure of seeing the beast up close. The incentive to further aspect the grey of his skin, the deformation of the skull beneath ruined flesh. Yes, this was no human at all much less a looney. It was something more akin to the draught creatures of Nordic fairytale, the kind of thing Romero would shoot in a film. Certainly, it had thought processes though, if it hadn’t Michael would be dead or at the very least sacrificed to its voodoo god.

The staring contest lasted just as long as Michael’s patience. When nothing came of this giant’s shallow threats, Michael offered up his peace offering. Bandages, now undeniably useless from the rain, were tossed into his lap. He stood with the dexterity of a house cat, the bends of his knees a fluid sort of snap that made Hercules jump. _Oh, he was funny this giant of the woods._ He was almost like a child in his faceless mask, his eyes unnaturally bright for someone undeniably dead. He’d lighten up soon enough, straightening his posture into a sitting position and stared at Michael as if he were some apparition come to warn him of Christmas past.  His fingers were drawn in the bandages and he threaded through like a grandma prepping her yarn. He seemed suspicious at first, turning them over and over again without looking away from Michael. 

It was bizarre behavior if Michael had ever seen it. He voiced his displeasure with a stone cold look that raised his chin and lowered his eyes, a look his mother wore when he’d broke something he had no business holding. Hockey Puck complied almost instantly, stopping his toil and holding those bandages as if they were snakes live and threatening to leave him. Soon enough, they were wrapped around his open wound with enough quickness to rival a seasoned nurse. Without really thinking about what the gesture meant, Michael offered him a hand. The giant took it and came to his feet.

 

**-X-**

 Walking with Hockey Puck wasn’t exactly a difficult task. After an uncomfortable staring session, he turned on his heel and made an awkward sort of shift deeper into the trees. When he realized Michael hadn’t been quick to follow, he turned back, stared at him so more, and remained stationary until they were in close proximity. Michael had been right to assume Hockey Puck knew these woods, for he passed each tree with a slight tap with the end of his machete, marking his place and noting an X that had been drawn into the wood for years so the bark wouldn’t heal itself. It was a lot like watching an artisan in his respected craft in this way. Think of the painters who sit beside the shore and create exact mirror images of what they see. One has no idea how it is really done but it comes to be and you can only marvel at the finished product. He followed nonetheless, quietly taking into account that each X faced inwards and not in the opposite direction.

At the heart of every X, once one had followed long enough on a trail that had been wiped clean from years of being trampled on, they came to a large collection of cabins that rounded each other in a semicircle. Moss grew on either side of their wood-log interface, the red paint of their doors chipped and ruined by the fog that wafted in from the lake and froze during winter. Between them was a large flagpole that bolstered the American flag looped and tangled around the center. Around the pole was a circle of rocks that held several names carved in by a drill or chisel of some sort. _John. Carrie. Another Michael. Bubba. Frederick. Billy.  Charles. Tiffany._ And in the smallest corner, on the most inspectable pebble, _Jason._ It was the kind of place one would see in their dreams, a place that held childhood memories away from parents and worries. It was once happy perhaps, once the kind of place you begged your parents for the funds for. It was this absence of life, the mere reminder that it once had been there, that made it so uneasy. Hockey Puck didn’t seem to notice.

He followed the beaten trail until it lead to a large building stacked upon large wooden columns. A sign rested on top, a weather-beaten wooden one that read _“Mess Hall”_ in large opaque letters with dripping paint. Hockey Puck seemed hardly perturbed, he entered the doubled door entrance and pressed his way inward as if he were going into his own home. Michael, finally letting the realization that he had been in a camp this entire time sink in, stopped at the entrance. It could be quite possible that it was here that Hockey Puck kept all his methods of torture. Maybe it was his plan all along to lead him here and skin his hide for jerky. _It wouldn’t exactly be unjustified._ Michael had been characteristically sour and offensive. But the longer he stood out here the more the cold seeped into his bones, the more the woods looked more twisting and imposing.

He noticed a rather handsome walking stick leaning against an old forgotten rocking chair. He took it within his hand, admired its weight, and brought it in with him for good luck. Upon entering he noticed the _mess hall_ was just that. _A fucking mess._ Tables lined the hall in the disorderly fashion of your average school. Plates, the cheap kind with several compartments for food still lined the places where children would sit. In each seat, behind every dish and set of plastic eatery, was a porcelain doll in every stage of decay. Some were headless, others weather-worn and others completely drenched in lake water. One fell straight on its face, an action that made Hockey Puck turn from his hiding place and sit it back up.

From behind him was the starting embers of a new flame, one that licked carefully at the intrusion of a large log. Michael held the walking stick behind his back. Hockey Puck, having touched one of the dolls who had swum in the lake, awkwardly wiped his hands down the front of his pants. _Silence._ Silence pervaded between them like a foul stench. Michael shifting backward and Hockey Puck almost attempting to follow but stopping. Before long, he was back to wiping his hands down his pants despite nothing being left to wipe. He dropped himself heavily on the bench that sat beside the now growing fire, his back toward Michael.

 

_Kill. Maim. Destroy._

 

The thought intruded upon Michael like the shout of “ _fire!”_ in a movie theater. It would be the perfect kill now that he thought about it. Hockey Puck was there with his back to him and none the wiser that he had brought in a weapon. Whatever it was he was planning, he certainly wasn’t getting him home. He could find another way out of this little slice of hell. He’d use the resources here and shelter until he had the know how to do it. Hockey Puck had served his purpose. Michael loomed ever closer, the boogeyman coming from the closet.

 

_Kill. Maim. Destroy._

 

One step over two. Three over four. The impulse grew like a weed in a tomato garden. He was right behind Hockey Puck, his weapon growing feverishly hot within his palms when he noticed what it was he was doing. A large stick was in Hockey Puck’s hands. Not the kind you hit someone with but the flimsy kind you pull off the trees while riding your bike. He held it toward the fire just far enough as not to catch its flame. In cartoons, Wiley Coyote would do something like it to warm a hotdog or toast a marshmallow. Again, exceedingly bizarre behavior for a giant.

Nonetheless, Michael found himself intrigued. He rounded the corner that enclosed the benches around the fire. Hockey Puck didn’t move, he instead sat there staring at the flames as they licked the wood and made it streak with red. The warmth it gave was lovely, it made the jumpsuit he wore feel as if it weren't as heavy with rain. With caution, he sat on the bench beside the giant. Silence pervaded for a few more moments while Michael’s limbs regained consciousness. With his eyes still trained on Hockey Puck, he brought the thin end of the walking stick before the fire. Just far enough so that it wouldn't catch its flame.


	5. Climbing the Beanstalk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hello Reader, 
> 
> Your reading of this is proof that you haven't given up on me. Words can't describe how thankful I am for that. As of this writing, it is the end of the first week of the new year. I hope it finds you well and on the precipice of something great. Anyway, I hope you find some enjoyment in this new chapter. I have tweaked the outline and initial story plans a bit.
> 
> Stay spooky.

###  Up the Beanstalk: Jack and his giant. 

Jason was a simple man. Not by intellect or merit, that sort is for the birds. Simple in the way that he enjoyed simple things, he appreciated things in their clarity and cleanliness. As a child, he loved nothing more than a picnic out in the afternoon sunshine, a warm bed with a tall glass of milk and a story come nighttime. Things, or rather the enjoyment of them, were in their best form wordless. His best experiences had been without words, his fondest ones from childhood coming from long car rides alone with his mother or wrapped around her knees as she knit. There is this banal happiness that comes from accompanied quiet.  To sit with someone without speech, to be with them but not engaged, it is a feeling as invigorating as the first sips of a hot drink, the mesmerizing melt of whipped cream as it dances past the lips. For a moment, Jason thought of that feeling of happiness, the happiness he had felt all those years ago when it was just him and his mother tucked away in their one bedroom apartment. He was so blissfully ignorant then. So wonderfully unaware that mother worked herself thin or that there were roaches in their kitchen. It seems even the most blase of childhood memories become canonized in the wake of adulthood. What he wouldn't give to be six years old again and lost in the illustrations of a children's book.  Now, staring at the blaze of a hungry fire, he was almost tricked into feeling that returning to childhood was a possibility.

In the wonderous candy floss of a dream, he almost gathered the courage to look at Michael. In a way, he wanted reassurance, some sort of proof that he wasn't the only one feeling some form of comfort. He couldn't manage it. Whether it was fear or some instinctual reasoning to stay polite, he wasn't sure but his eyes came to rest on his bandaged arm instead. He was reminded all too suddenly how monstrous Michael really was. Enjoying his company, even just subliminally felt perverse and almost obscene.  His mother was a fairweather Christian but they had attended mass every odd Sunday when the need had struck her. The men in the black gowns would call it 'sinful'. That was the word. It sounded like the onomatopoeia for a snake shifting over kitchen tile.  _ Sinful. Sinful. That's the ticket _ . He cared not for the words of the righteous but the point was made. There are things one ought not to do in this world. Roasting imaginary marshmallows with the Boogeyman seemed to fit the bill. What would his mother say? 

_ “ What do you think he’ll do to us now that he’s in our camp, Jason?" _

He was dead set on making it clear that he did not fear Michael Myers. Mother saying something like that felt like a betrayal of sorts. A mother's job is to console and soothe. Dealing with monsters and the disposing of their bodies is the son's job. In his conundrum, he grit his teeth and turned the stick in the flats of his palms. It spun, the tips just barely dipping into the flame and catching the light. From his periphery, Jason could see a mass of white turn to look at the spectacle. Perhaps Michael was entertained. If he could read his face, he would have liked to scan his reaction to a fire at close proximity. That would be a worthy weakness, maybe Jason could set the bastard on fire. But alas, Michael remained deathly still. If he had presented some sort of Achilles heel, Jason had failed to catch it.  If it had revealed itself in the moments that were spent walking here and sitting, Jason had again _ missed it. _

_   
_ From what he saw of Michael, he was unnervingly calm for someone involved in such a brutal car wreck. Even the blood from his arm seemed healed enough, the wound rolled back into the sleeve as if it had never happened. Even more unusual was the manner in which he either could not or refused to speak. As hypocritical as it sounded, Jason was becoming unnerved by Michael’s silence. Humans were naturally chatty creatures. Even in the throng of death, they can still manage an ‘ _ oh god _ ’ or a ‘ _ please don’t do this _ ’ in the heat of the moment.  His own silence had been a byproduct of years of forced muteness out in the woods. The condition was made only worse by the degradation of his body. Jason could speak if he wanted to, he was sure of it. But it never occurred to him to practice. Mother rarely gave him the incentive to say much anyway. 

_ “ I know you hear me, Jason.”  _

He thought of speaking then. Maybe a “ _ hi _ ” or a casual “ _ how are you _ ?” Both sentimental phrases that seemed like foreign languages to him. Was that even how they did it these days? He had been dead and confined here for such a long time, perhaps there was some new way to greet someone. Vaguely he could remember the awful slang he’d catch from television and the odd motion picture, but nothing substantial. The kids in  _ Leave it to Beaver _ would say things like ‘ _ oh golly. _ ’ and ‘ _ shucks _ .’ When he had still been in camp, he had said the latter upon noticing a patch of mud slid down his backside. It took him the rest of the day to realize his campmates were not laughing at his witty humor. Despite his trepidation, he made his first wary steps into speech. Pushing the air out of an esophagus that was deemed lame felt like pushing a boulder up an inclined hill. 

His lips remained stationed and sealed despite his command for them to form the sounds necessary for an  _ M and I. _ From himself he could just barely register the gurglings of a grunt but he suppressed it.  _ What would Michael think of him if he just sat there growling at him?  _ He wasn't sure. Mostly due to the fact that he didn't know Michael. He did not know his genus or category. Now that he thought about it, he couldn't rest on a species either. With a dash of courage, he chanced a look at Michael. From what he saw, he certainly looked human. In fact, he didn't look too different from Jason sitting there with his stick near the flame. He was smaller than Jason, his stature more freeing and less stacked. It was the body of the man who could work his way around any obstacle, keep endurance and all that. Regardless of his irregularity, Micahel was human it would seem. He had a human’s shape, a human’s hands. He even had a human’s eyes. 

Which brought Jason to another question.  _ What lied behind Michael’s mask? _ He would certainly like to know, but removing it forcefully would be quite rude. His mother had always taught him to be courteous, even to those who did not return the favor. Jason hadn’t realized he had been staring at Michael for such a long time until he saw those careful blue eyes roll in his direction.  _ Staring is rude too.  _ Jason automatically resigned to looking before him, head bowing down in a shallow form of shame before he prodded his stick into the flame and let the fire lick its way over it. He tossed it in before it had a chance to bite at his fingers. Michael now had that horrible white face of his fixed entirely on Jason and it made him feel miserably small. Perhaps this was what mice felt like when vipers went in to strike them, the last sensation they felt before they were swallowed whole or struck with poison. 

_ “All these years raising you and you’ve become a coward! He’s going to kill you, Jason. He’s going to run you through like a dog! What are you going to do about it?”  _

Nothing it would seem. While his mother was right to some degree, he had doubts that Michael was in any particular hurry to “ _ run him through like a dog. _ ” If he was, he certainly could have done it on the walk from the woods and to the camp. Maybe he could have done it when Jason had his back turned, there were plenty of stones large enough for a nice blow but light enough for Michael to get over a shoulder. Maybe he’d find a bear trap and wait for Jason to walk over it, strangulation worked too if one was feeling at a loss for parts. Whatever, the point was moot anyway. Whatever it was that kept Michael at ease was in place and in motion. Certainly, he saw something in Jason that made him worthy of keeping his limbs and his immortal life. It would be nice to ask Michael what that something was. 

“  _ Kill him. Now. _ ” 

For once in his life, Jason thought his mother’s behavior was brash and irregular. She wasn’t so silver-tongued in life, quite the opposite. She was kind, the softness about her the kind that enveloped you and kept you warm. Never did she swear or curse, her voice raising only when it was necessary to get some parental point across. Her scent, her favorite perfume, was that of petunias. When she hugged you in her hand-knitted sweaters, you’d have the smell of her on you for hours. That delicate warmth of her arms, the way she’d kiss his ears and they would ring afterward.  _ These were the things he missed most.  _  It seemed it was only after death that she began to speak so vitriolic, her speech slurring on every odd word as if the teeth were too heavy to form the most basic syllables. Regardless of how much he examined it, her voice made him feel as if he were shrinking. He had seen it in a movie once. A blonde little Alice took a bite out of a cookie and she volted to the ground, becoming just small enough to slip into a keyhole. He wondered how many times in his life he wished for such a power, to become just small enough to slip by unnoticed.  _ Oh, lucky Alice.  _

Just then Michael had dropped that large stick he brought in with an unforgiving slam. The noise of it would have made a normal person jump, but to Jason, it was nothing but a mere disturbance. Once in the flames, the wood was licked and spit upon but did not seem to burn. It was the varnish that surrounded the handle, it was only then that Jason realized it was the storyteller's cane. Anyone who held it, be them camper, guardian or leader, had the power to tell that night’s camp story. Truth be told, Jason had never touched it before, and doing so now felt like reaching down and taking the sword out of its stone. Micahel, whether upset or just plain bored, stalked off elsewhere as Jason bent over to retrieve the cane from the fire. Pulling it up, Jason marveled at the charred wood that seemed neither burnt nor particularly brittle. It was blackened at the end and was hot to the touch but Jason was sure it still held its mystic power of storytelling.  _ Yes, this was what he needed.  _ With this, he would have the strength to form his voice and finally speak. Jason held it in his hands and felt its radiating power. Perhaps some native chief had blessed it centuries before, perhaps it went from hand to hand through the generations just for this purpose. When he gathered the courage to try it out, Michael had somehow left without his notice. 

  
  


**\- X -**

 

Jason was at a loss. Perhaps he was right in his first assumption that Michael was some sort of ghost come to haunt his ground because there was absolutely no trace of him. Not a trace in the mud or a trail of broken branches in the way of the leaves. He couldn’t have gotten far. Just accounting the distance it took to get from one stretch of the camp from the other, the likeliness that Michael had just run out of sight was slim. But for reasons Jason couldn’t entirely explain, he  _ had  _ to look for him. If Michael left, he would have no one to practice the power of the storyteller’s gift on. If Michael left, it meant another odd transition into Winter until the next Summer came. Campers would try and return, he’d kill them and the process would start all over again until the end of time. The thought made Jason feel ill, and he kicked open the door to one of the surrounding cabins with enough force to make the wood splinter. This one hadn’t been open for a while and the dust that was kicked up from Jason’s intrusion was a testament to that. 

“  _ If he’s gone you can rest easy, child. You seemed much too frightened to get rid of him yourself.” _

Jason spun around and glanced at the flagpole that sat at the center of camp. Above it, the sky was starting to turn that ocular hue of new light. The stars would be gone soon, in their place would be cheery cotton ball clouds that were sent as apologies for last night’s storm. He always felt partial awe at watching the sunrise, it was something that made staying here for an eternity a little less terrible. He told himself that if he could manage to see a sunrise every day then he would get on well enough.  It could be a treat at the end of a wasteful night, something colorful to look forward to in his world of gray. He looked downward, out towards the stretch of land that cars used to drive over when the campers arrived. They looked like scribbles of a childhood drawing now, all mismatched and out of shape. Above them, Jason noticed that there was one cabin, the one that used to be an all girl's hut, had its door ajar. 

_ Oh. So that's where you went.  _

Once inside, it didn't take Jason long to register the suggestive noises of a struggle. Feet were kicking up on old wood, limbs flailing about and landing on something soft, malleable. When Jason entered the cabin, he had done so quietly, as if minding someone's privacy. The cabins had always been horrifically simple. They weren't built for much more than sleeping so they were essentially high rise rooms with the bunk-beds piled three to a set and a lone window at the back. It was only then that Jason realized that two of the beds had been brought together and two grey wool blankets had been stretched over so that an adult’s frame could lay atop. There were bags too, big black garbage bags that had various assortments of cans and clothes spilling out from the top.  _ Squatters. His camp had been housing squatters.  _ The thought felt like something unthinkable, like something from the whispers of a rumor or a tall tale. The evidence was there unfortunately, it was squirming and cursing in Michael's hands. 

“--let go of me--let me go you fuckin fuck--” 

The sentence was cut short as Michael brought his hands tighter around the man’s esophagus. Curious how Michael seemed so calm in the face of all this. The way he looked, you would think he was holding a struggling cockroach whose legs were freshly pulled off. Jason wasn’t too distracted not to notice that the homeless man had had a friend hiding underneath one of the beds. Why a fully grown man would choose to sleep under a bed rather than on it was beyond Jason but supposedly that was the logic of homeless people. Regardless of his tactic, the man seemed keen on saving his friend, he kept low and moved as if he were a panther shifting through the high grass of Africa. The irony that someone as miserable as a bum would have something like honor was not wasted on Jason. He thought of the stray technician he had almost caught back at the crash site. He thought of how quickly he ran at the first sign of trouble, even after Jason had sliced that lady’s belly open. There was something to be admired there, but Jason couldn’t really name it. Perhaps he would ponder over the existence of honor amongst squatters but a new thought raged in his mind. 

 

_ Michael. Not Michael.  _

 

If the situation were less dire, he would have realized the words were not said in his mother’s voice. In fact, they weren’t words at all really. They were more like codes that had no sound, an impulse that didn’t have any rhyme or reason. It was like the jerking reaction one gets when they feel the heat beneath their palm or the bacon on the stove begins to pop.  _ Not Michael.  _ Before he knew it, the storyteller’s cane had gained a mind of its own and sunk cleanly across the man’s skull. He hadn’t the chance to scream but he did make a few gurgling noises as he plummeted to the ground in a gyrating mess.  Jason almost felt sorry for this one. When he brought his boot down upon the soft spot of the man’s fresh wound, it was mostly out of mercy.

“--Jas--Jason--Jason.” 

Jason had become something of an urban legend here at the lake, he had even heard a couple of campers telling stories of him around a fire. So it was no surprise that a local would recognize him. It didn’t change the fact that hearing his name out loud and directed at him was something like rapture.  _ Yes, he had a name. He was somebody _ . The thought was a nice one and he turned his cane around in his hands with a newfound sense of vigor.  _ Yes, Jason. That’s his name. Someone knows his name.  _

Michael, who had turned his head to figure out all the ruckus, looked directly at the twitching and gasping sack of flesh that had once been a squatter. His attention stayed there for a long time, long enough that the man he held began to beat helplessly on his shoulders. Michael finally looked up, eyes falling upon Jason. Not in gratitude, of course, Jason had a feeling he was incapable of such complexity. The look Michael wore was something of vague recognition. The kind of look you give your favorite bedsheets right before you toss them in the wash. _ Oh, it’s you. You still exist. _ The look said. Jason had half a mind to whack him in his head too. 

“Help--help.” The man began to fade from consciousness. Michael’s head tilted and Jason imagined him with some sort of grin. He nodded toward the body on the ground which still, beyond good logic, continued to twitch. 

_ Your work?  _

Jason looked down at his cane then back towards Michael, eyes raised and chin lowered. It was an odd feeling that spread into his chest. If he could find its equivalent, he would match it to the one he felt when his mother had chosen to take him around the campsite and introduce him to every staff, camper, and passerby she just so happened to see. It was attention he had not earned, a sense of notice he was just not used to. 

_ Yes.  _

To this, Michael pressed no further and Jason felt relieved.  Instead, he tossed his head toward the bloodied cane with eyes that would suggest hunger. 

_ Pass me that, will you?  _

Much to his own horror, Jason synched the muscles necessary to commence the tradeoff but mother voiced her displeasure and stopped the process.

  
_ “Jason, you fool.”  _

She had a point. Here he was about to arm the very man who had tried to kill him not twenty hours before.  Not just any weapon too,  _ his weapon _ , a gift that granted the owner a voice. Giving him the storyteller's cane would be giving him the opportunity to finish the job he started by the crash-site. Even worse, he would be giving Michael his voice. Jason hesitated, head bowing lower. Michael rolled his eyes back to the man, pressed his fingers deeper into the bearded neck.  _ Disappointed. Michael was disappointed in Jason. _ This gave him a feeling like being dunked head first in the cold water of the lake. He had failed some test, lost another person’s good favor. He tossed the cane up, caught it so that the burnt edge cut faint marks across his palm. 

_ Here.  _

Michael’s head snapped toward the weapon, then back at Jason. He held his gaze there for quite some time as if he expected Jason of some sort of a fib. He hadn’t looked away when he threw his victim into the wall, making the poor sod cough and gasp back to life. His relief would be short-lived, for Michael grabbed that cane with enough vigor to nearly slice Jason’s fingers. Jason moved quickly backward, legs nearly tripping over the fresh body that laid right behind. Watching Michael work was like watching a pianist strum his keys. He was not frenzied like Jason thought a psychopath would be. Instead, he was methodical and slow, plummeting the stick over the man’s head with enough force to split the skull open. It was a vicious murder none the less, the blood forever staining the dust-laden sheets on the bed.

It only occurred to Jason to start counting the blows halfway through. _ One, two, three.  _ The screams had turned to gurgles by five but Michael kept going. He stopped at twelve, stood to his full height and marveled at his work. With a tilted head Jason thought he looked like a beagle who had heard an odd sound, that prime beastial curiosity was there. Perhaps he thought himself an artist looking at his greatest piece. The destruction of torn flesh, burst arteries, and twisted limbs. Jason had painted something like it in art activities, a vermillion mishmash of incomprehensible shapes and blotches. Modern artists, if they hadn’t known what it was, would call it magnificent. Perhaps that’s what Michael was thinking as he stood there in all his silence.  _ Oh, this is good work this is. I ought to frame this, put it in a museum.  _

Whatever it was he was thinking, the thoughts were disturbed when Michael finally remembered Jason existed.  He was slow to turn, taking the storyteller's stick over his shoulder. The quiet permeated before Michael’s heavy boots fell over the blood-soaked wood.  _ Ah, yes. You’re next.  _ Mother started screaming something in his mind, but it was entirely unintelligible. Perhaps she was right, he had been a bad boy. He let his head dip lower as he began to register the worst of her abuse. 

_ “You fool! You fucking sap!  He’s going to kill us and it’s all your fucking fault! It’s your fault you stupid fuck--”  _

In that moment, Jason pondered death more so than anything. Mother’s words began to wash over him like the warm sway of a hot bath. They were meaningless, trivial things, pinpricks that neither hurt or served any direct purpose. He knew he couldn’t die, knew Michael had nothing in his power that could end him. But even so, he entertained the possibilty as if it were a dream he had had the night before. What would dying be like? He had died the superficial death more than once, his soul lingering amongst the decrepit remains of his body like an unwelcome house fly. But to truly die, to pass fully from this world and onto the next. Well, he had no idea what that was like. Would it be painful? Would the the gates of heaven stand over the siege of clouds and winged men as he slowly climbed the stairs up to them? No. There was no such thing.

Michael had blood on his shoes. Jason only knew this because he was standing right in front of him, the storyteller’s stick still juxtaposed in his hand and covered in muck. Michael was right in front of him. Just standing there. Slowly, as if doing so in favor of caution, Jason looked up. Michael was there alright, but there was something different about him. It was almost as if he had shifted somehow, his chin dipped and his eerie blue eyes peering beneath a furrowed brow hidden by latex and gore. Jason couldn’t name the expression. It was something perplexing, a thought-provoking stride that suggested knowingness but impartial confusion.

_ What are you doing?  _

If Michael spoke, that’s what he would ask. He would ask Jason why he was standing in the middle of a murder scene with his head tucked under him like a poor scolded puppy who had just pissed on the matt. And what was worse, Jason didn’t know. He had put so much mental stock in Michael’s monstrosity that he had just assumed that this would be the moment he chose to end him. When he didn’t, when the shape just stared at him with that glass-like stare, Jason felt at a loss. Now he would have to reaccess Michael, pick apart prior assumptions and build new ones. It felt like a meaningless task, one that had neither party’s best interest. 

_ You’re a  strange one, aren’t you? _

Michael tossed his head upwards, blinking only once as if to suggest he was above the situation. Nonetheless, when no reaction came, he took two steps away from Jason and held forward the storyteller’s stick. 

_ This is yours, isn’t it?  _

Slowly, Jason’s eyes went to the fabled cane in a shallow form of recognition. It was ruined now. The singed end, with its splintered wood and blackened wood, now housed wads of brain matter and clumps of hair. Certainly, Michael had beaten out all of its magic properties. Now it was nothing more than a gory walking stick, something appropriated for violence rather than wonder. Now that Jason thought about it, maybe that’s all it ever was. In bubbling frustration, Michael shook the cane in Jason’s direction, clearly losing his patience. Jason’s eyes carefully traveled back over Michael, shaking his head then nodding over back towards the other man. 

_ No. You keep it. I have better toys at home. _

Of course, that wasn’t what was said but there seemed to be a fair sense of understanding in the somber way Michael nodded and slowly brought the cane back down to thigh level. For the time being, it appeared Michael had lost interest in Jason. Having got his prize and been assured that there would be no repercussions for his actions down at the crash site, he found himself free to venture to other problems. Jason became a prop to the setting, a shape as irrelevant as a passing tree or bush. When Michael turned, he did so in a way that suggested he was out running errands. All other matters, the time of day, the changing weather, these things were all circumstantial. It was as if he had a checklist somewhere in that working brain of his, a calling card for all things important. It would seem Jason was not a part of that agenda and the thought made him feel as though the world had been spun upon one of those teacups at Disneyland. It was a horrible feeling, this knowing of unimportance. When Michael busied himself with searching through a discarded trash bag, Jason had a long-running pang of dismay. Surely there was something he could do, something that would put him back in Michael’s line of sight, back in his good favor. He turned to the second bag that sat abused and forgotten in the far corner and searched through it just as Michael had done. 

There was nothing of interest in it. Not at first, at least. About a dozen loose articles of clothing, a worn sweater, a t-shirt that had a college football logo, but nothing that would please Michael. That was until he reached the far bottom of the bag. It was a large irregular shape, a form that neither fit or belonged. Upon further inspection, he found that it was none other than a cardboard box, a box of cereal to be particular. On the front some charming cartoon character waved a happy little hello, his red hair bobbed and his striped shirt darkened by creases and wet spots on the box. The cereal inside seemed fine enough, the plastic casing had protected it from further damage. For whatever the reason, this captivated Jason’s attention long enough for him to notice that Michael was staring at him again. To Jason’s limited relief, it was not his usual look of dismissal but a sort of keen interest. 

_ Oh. So that’s what you wanted.  _

Slowly, he approached Michael as if he were a stray cat lounging in his mother’s garden. Soft steps, not to frighten or to be frightened by. A rightfully cautious approach. When he stretched his arm out to offer the bag, he was surprised to find that the grip that met it was just as slow, just as cautious. Jason had half a mind to think about the possibilty of mutual fear, an idea that both enthralled and perplexed him. He had never thought that Michael could hold a reservation towards him, he hadn’t even entertained it as a possibilty. The idea that there was something behind that mask, something that could think and operate and want, well it felt a lot like believing in the tooth fairy. It’s a nice thought in the way all childish fantasies are, but it is foolish at best. It was easier to think of Michael as some mindless killing machine, a mecha or some android. It felt right to call him a monster, a ghost or a phantom. It was the comfort of knowing something that cannot be unknown, that curious specimen that has no place in nature or reference. A shape. 

Of course, this inner turmoil bared no credence on Michael. Without betraying the methodology in his thoughts, he crossed his legs over each other, sat down and popped the bag open with a swift pull. His mask was lifted just high enough to reveal a perfectly normal looking chin and lips. Before long he was shoveling all that sugar-coated muck into his mouth by the handful, contently chewing along like the child the brand was so clearly geared towards. Jason noted how funny he looked sitting with the mask so high against his forehead, his cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk stockpiling for winter. He wanted to laugh, for the first time in a long time, he felt the familiar rise in his lungs, the spasm of his stomach. But alas, nothing. The thought was there, the impulse keen, but his body lacked. His bulking frame was no longer accustomed to such stimuli, it had evolved to hulk and tower not chuckle or laugh. What came out instead was a guttural “-- _ kee _ ”, a sound that was deprived of both breath and value. 

Michael stopped his chewing, one hand still raised up to his lips in preparation for another bite. Jason felt something like shame overtake him and the feeling was something dreadfully familiar. He was reminded of a failed attempt at public schooling, a seminar where he was expected to proclaim the pledge of the allegiance but stammered on the very word  _ allegiance _ . Irony would have it if this was the point Michael chose to speak. If he did choose to mouth off, if he chose now as the perfect opportunity to make fun, Jason decided that he would rip his jaw off its hinges. To his surprise and steaming relief, the shape did no such thing. He instead tilted his head, resumed his chewing and shoveled another palm full of cereal into his mouth. 

_ You’re a strange one, aren’t you?   _

Jason nodded in a subtle thanks. Michael nodded just to mimic the action. 

 

**\- X  -**

 

When Michael had finished his snack, Jason had convinced himself that he was right to leave him to his own devices. He had been kind enough. Saved the bastard twice, got him some food and even a nice souvenir. When he went to leave him, he had done so with the impression that he was turning his back on a completed task. Michael had no need for him anymore, the way Jason saw it. And their silent little reprieve here in the cabin gave him the impression they were at a cease-fire. While the thought was disheartening, Jason knew better than to assume that this was the point his afterlife would be taking the drastic turn. By sunrise, he expected to be back to his old routine, his eternal groundskeeper job. Tomorrow he would resume his protection over Camp Crystal Lake, the leaves would dry over and Summer would come after the spring. It was only after his hand gripped the doorknob that he noticed Michael was on his feet again, dropping the bag of cereal so that the little red loops scattered across the wood like panicked beetles. His mask was on again, of course, and he pulled it down with enough vigor to suggest haste. 

_ Where are you going? _

God, Michael was weird. If he wasn’t out killing something or stuffing his face, he was half past mania. 

_ Outside now. Outside. Goodbye.  _

When Jason opened the door, it swung rather than slammed. The bug net on either side absorbed the most sound and Jason was thankful for this when he saw what was happening at his mess hall. Vans. Three of them. The same kind that brought Michael here and they were all parked outside his mess hall. From a distance, Jason could just make out some bloke who wore an Inspector Gadget jacket with darkened slacks. Beside him stood a man in all black head to foot, his arms juxtaposed in the way only armed men hold them. He wore a helmet despite not coming here on a bike, the white stripes down his thighs gleaming in the sunlight as he strode back toward the vans. Two men just like him left the mess hall. Then three. Then four.

 

_ Not Michael. _

 

The thought came clearly to him when he could recall just what those outfits meant. They were the kind of outfits toy soldiers wear, the scampering little ants you find fleeing from underneath Godzilla when the nukes start rolling. Special Ops, something of that nature. Not the military surely, but they weren’t those silly little hicks that come to put papers on your trucks when they’ve been parked too lonh. These were the types of officers he had only seen on television on the late nights he would sneak to watch.  _ Swat team, F.B.I, the Marines, Riot Contro _ l, there was some name for them. Something. Something that meant the bad guys were about to get taken care of. 

 

_ Not Michael.  _

 

Jason shut the door again and turned to look at Michael who seemed just perplexed. 

_ What’s wrong?  _

 

_ Not Michael. _

 

_ What did you see?  _

Michael made his way over to the door but Jason stood in his way. He brought his hands to the man’s shoulders and gave them a push, guiding him back toward the bodies and trash bags. He knew what would happen if he let Michael out of that cabin and out toward those men. It did not matter if they came in with tanks or machine guns or in knight’s armor, Michael would be on them like a hound on a fresh scent. His eyes would go blank, his fists clenched and he would cease to be anything more than an impulse machine. The horror of what would happen next filled Jason with a sense of dread he hadn’t felt since he had found his mother’s severed head. 

They would shoot him, of course. That was their job, that was their nature. They would point their horrible guns, fire at will and Michael would be no more. He thought of Daffy Duck blowing his beak sideways from the barrel of a gun, Tom leaking water from his abdomen once a shot had been aimed through his belly. He would be swiss cheese, dead or even worse, completely destroyed. At least with mother, he had something to remember her by, some physical proof that she had existed and was not a figment of his imagination. Michael would disappear like a fleeting dream, falling back into the fog of his failing memory like a ship not properly docked. The thought made him feel as if an anvil had been dropped down his throat and into his stomach. 

Michael resented being pushed around like a rag doll, he knocked past Jason once or twice but his eyes betrayed him. At first, he was keen to get a closer look out the window but was persuaded elsewhere when Jason knocked him down on his ass a little too roughly. The brute hardly knew his own strength, after all. The eyes beneath the mask were wide, shocked, almost as if he had realized some ugly truth that was hiding in plain sight. Perhaps he thought Jason had gone mad, that he had snapped and had just figured out the location of his bloodlust. He dragged his boots on the ground, looked at the storyteller’s stick and went in for the move. 

_ You must think I’m stupid.  _

Jason caught him before he had the chance to make a sprint, halfway regretting his decision to save Michael rather than eviscerate him. He held him at his middle and lifted up. Jason was surprised at how light his contemporary was but it didn’t change the fact that the struggling made it all the harder to deal with. He kicked and batted his arms, tried to wiggle free but Jason wasn’t having it. He’d save Michael even if it killed him. But by God, if Michael wasn’t the strongest person he had ever had to tangle with. Fighting with Michael was a lot like trying to get a boa constrictor out of his stranglehold. Every time Jason thought he had some sort of leverage, Michael would be back with some sort of vengeful strike that made him reaccess his own abilities. 

Bang. 

A gunshot rang out about a stone’s throw away. The cabin next door, maybe. Or the one before that, Jason’s depth perception was useless indoors. With hands still gripping the collar of his jumpsuit, Michael froze with his eyes lulling back toward the main entrance. Jason stopped too, halfway asking himself what they even had to shoot at. More squatters, perhaps, Jason shivered at the thought. Michael was happy for the distraction nonetheless, he reached for Jason’s throat and squeezed. Squeezed until his knuckles went white and the bottom lids of his eyes began to quiver. He even started to breathe heavily, feet kicking in what could have either been desperation or unbridled rage. 

_ Why won’t you die?  _

Jason looked at Michael with eyes downcast and disinterested. 

_ Are you finished?  _

Another shot. This one closer and Jason definitely registered that there was movement somewhere in Cabin C. Michael, who had finally gotten the chance to understand what had caused all the hullaballoo, took his hands off of Jason’s neck and brought them around the arms that helped pin him to the wall. His nails dug in there, damaging the bandages he had worked so hard to get placed there just the night before. 

_ Let me down.  _

Jason slowly did just that, looking straight in Michael’s eyes with the unwavering consciousness of an eagle on a field mouse. From what he could tell, Michael had the same look in his eye, the same careful sort of stare that would beat a child into obedience. But Jason was not a child and he certainly felt it. For once in his life, he felt in charge of a situation, responsible in a way he had never truly felt before. For the first time, he was the one calling the shots, he was the big strong adult who knew what was best. He waited for mother to tell him how well he was doing, to congratulate him for finally thinking on his own and acting quickly. She didn’t. A sound came from Michael’s throat instead, a guttural kind of growl that made Jason wonder if he was part beast. His hands pried at Jason’s and the bandages began to unwind. 

_ Let me go. Let me go. _

_ No.  _

From behind them, Jason could hear the muffled sounds a man shouting. It sounded authoritative, like a war cry. Another gunshot. To this, Michael shot his attention back towards the door and looked back to Jason with pleading almost desperate eyes. His legs kicked. 

_ Let me go! Let me go!  _

_ Will you promise to behave?  _

For all intended purposes, Jason was still mentally a child. He thought in that simplistic, clean way children do. All problems had answers, all solutions had a checklist. So when he brought his pinky up and held it outward, it seemed to him like a logical reaction. Michael’s eyes narrowed as if he expected Jason of mutiny. 

_ Do you promise? _

From beside them, Jason’s victim began to gurgle, probably brought back to life with the consolation that other humans were close by. “--h-help. Help me.” 

_ Do you promise? _

Michael began to kick again, struggling. 

_ Do you promise?  _

“God, God almighty. Help me! Jason is here! Help me!” 

_ Fine.  _

Obviously swallowing some modicum of pride, Michael wrapped his pinky around Jason’s so hard that a normal person would have felt pain. It didn’t matter though. Before the armed guard on the other side of the door had a chance to investigate the last cabin, before the brain beaten squatter began to seize, the two culprits had jumped out of the end window. All the collection squad had left to prove that Michael Myers was in the area was two dead homeless men, their trash, and a discarded spool of blackened medical bandages.


	6. Acquainted

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided to make this chapter a bit more indulgent so that I will have lots of breathing room for the last. 
> 
> Stay Spooky.

 

### Acquainted: There's no place like home.

Michael hadn’t really had friends growing up. Sure there was the odd son of the accountant down the street, or some poor little brother tagging along with one of Judith’s friends but there was never really anyone who stayed the night or built pillow forts in the living room. When he thought of the word or tried to match a equivalent, Laurel Campbell came to mind. She wore the same black shoes with the buckle over the ankle because they were the ones Alice had in the movie. He hadn’t remembered much about her, only that she looked nothing like Alice and that he had asked to use her red pen one day in class. He would forever remember her name, however, because she would publish a book years later that claimed to detail the spiral into madness that would eventually lead to the infamous Myers house murder. He had never read the novel himself but Loomis had read him a couple of passages in an effort to provoke him to respond. The Alice shoes and a red ribbon drawn out to look like spattered blood adorned the cover while the author’s name sat engraved in big opaque letters. Michael thought it looked like something that should be advertising a crime drama. 

“Me and Michael” or “I knew Michael Myers” as it stood in its German translation, would reach the New York Time’s best seller list in the year 1980. Talkshow hosts would call it a must read and book clubs would usher it into their reading lists. None of it was true of course, the details in it were much too personal and detailed to be recollected from a child’s point of view. Michael had never carved open the stomach of a squirrel just to show Laurel what the color red looked like. Nor did he ever threaten to do the same to her if she were to tell their teacher. The only instance they ever shared the same space was the class picture that adorned the back of the book, even then they were separated by alphabetical sections. With no one left alive to correct her and the public thirsty for an explanation, “Me and Michael” entered the market in a perfect climate. Campbell was sure to have made millions. Regardless of whether or not it was the moral, or respectful thing to do, it brought up a peculiar question in Michael’s mind. 

_ Was that what friends were like?  _

From what he could deduce from the few passages read to him, the Michael in “Me and Michael” had once been quite the socialite. He would show up to birthday parties and swimming pool meetups and he even had a penpal in Georgia. He and Laurel were especially close, he was apparently her first kiss. The Michael in the book was functional to the degree that he could fake human emotion, mimicking it when it was useful. He was frightening because he could switch between a boy and a monster at the drop of a hat. In one paragraph he is laughing over some comic book antics while the other he is raving about how he’s _ going to cut his mommy up for daddy’s stew. _ The real Michael had no such disparities. He was always distant, almost as if his body was a mere shell for a wandering spirit. Judith’s diary entries were a testament to that but they were locked away somewhere in an evidence bin. There was no “normal” switch in the real Michael Myers, he did not entertain his teachers and classmates with a facade of happiness. He was just simply,  _ there.  _

That’s why he didn’t have friends like Judith did. At least, that’s what he was told and what he started believing. He didn’t cater to make sure others felt comfortable, didn’t smile or snort or laugh the way little boys should. He was, for the most part, alone. He was alright with that. Loneliness comes to those with an idle mind and he made sure that his solitary confinement was spent with at least some modicum of substance. Friendship was work, friendship was a give and take sort of thing. Michael had nothing to give and nothing he saw worth taking. Which is why he found Jason to be such an abnormality. 

Jason. Jason whose name he had only learned from the lips of a dying man. Jason who seemed to be made of titanium. Jason who was some kind of supernatural creature. Jason the looney. Jason, his only hope. 

If he had known that there were armed guards coming to cart him back to Smith’s Grove, Michael wouldn’t have blamed Jason for high-tailing it in the opposite direction. He wouldn’t even have the audacity to hold a grudge because operating in self-interest is the most logical thing in the world. Michael had been horrible to Jason the moment he had step foot on his camp and he had no intention of kissing ass or turning on that “normal” switch to play friends. Despite all that, there he was being led by the arm as this man pulled him away from screaming officers and another fired gunshot. 

_ Why? _

Why hadn’t Jason just opened the window and left once he realized what was happening? If their situations were reversed, that’s what Michael would have done. He would have left Jason shifting through those bags like a fly stuck on sticky paper and he would have slept well that following night. Jason was nothing to Michael. Michael was nothing to Jason. So why? Why was there such a haste to get him out of danger? Michael couldn’t figure it out and nothing made him more furious than feeling confused. He clenched his fist, the one that started to tingle from Jason’s vice-like grip. It was only then, in the faintest shine of a passing thought, that Michael realized Jason had brought along that damn bloody walking stick. 

_ Stop. Stop. Stop _ . 

Michael dragged his feet, digging his heels into earth softened by a night's rain. Unfortunately for him, the mud was slippery and it wasn't long until he was being dragged across a stripe of mud and foliage that marked up his calves and backside like the imprint of a criminal’s thumb on paper. If you have ever seen a child in mid-tantrum in a grocery store clinging to a tired parent, you know the pose. One limp useless body against a much larger and commanding figure, one that knows better and plans to act on that. Humorously enough, Jason gave him the same disgruntled and pensive look as he went down. 

_ What in the world is wrong with you? Get up. _

Jason pulled on his arm, almost pulling it out of the socket. There was panic somewhere in that gesture but Michael was too proud to honor it.

_ No. Let me go. Stop. Let me go. _

From the holes in his mask, Michael could just barely catch the roll in Jason's eyes. 

_ Jesus Christ.  _ That look said and before he knew it, Michael was hoisted over the giant’s shoulder just like a screaming toddler in the deli section. 

_ What the hell are you doing?!  _

Michael struggled but Jason seemed not to notice, he beat on his back, kicked his legs. 

_ Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!  _

In his temper tantrum, Michael managed to reach out and grab a branch held out over a rotten borough. Rabbits had lived there the spring before, but a cunning fox had eaten them all up the month preceding fall. Now the hole was a gaping maw, an accident waiting to happen. When Michael grabbed that branch it created a disparity that caused Jason to lose his footing. One foot went into the hole, twisted and sent the rest of the body down like a great oak on the word  _ timber !   _

  _Shit._

Neither Michael or Jason had noticed that there was a small hill that opened up into denser hills. They both became horrifically aware of this as they tumbled down that mossy plane and into their own messy pile of arms and legs. There was a moment, somewhere at the top where it was very hard to know whose body was who. There were two heads, four arms, four legs, two masks. The walking stick was left somewhere at the top, lodging itself into mud and foliage.  By the time they landed, Michael was dazed enough to think he died. 

It was dark, terribly dark, but he could still feel the mud seeping in through his coveralls and to his skin, still feel the ache of a disgraceful fall. 

  _Nose. Do I still have a nose?_

He reached up to check, found only inconspicuous and confusing latex. He spun the mask around, located the eye holes and coughed. Yes, he still had a nose. Still had a second face. Still had ten fingers and a boot on each foot. He had had worse falls, worse injuries. Other than the throbbing pain in the back of his head courtesy of a stray stone, he would say he was just peachy. 

Michael sat up, feeling a bit woozy as he curled his arms around his stomach and coughed again. Pain. A sharp, dignified pain like a needle raised on an odd step that you just happen to step on.  There was pain somewhere inside himself but where it was he couldn't exactly say. You hear horror stories about internal bleeding and busted arteries. He wondered if that was what was wrong, wondered if he had finally managed to break himself beyond repair. 

Not likely. The world couldn't be that lucky. Gingerly, he stood up and brought himself on weary feet. From a few feet away, he caught a stag peering at him through a veil of a naked tree branch. He moved forward towards it, his intentions to kill it and eat it, when his foot stepped on something sharp and brittle. A snapping sound. Not a soft click like a bird's bone or a twig. A hearty, deep sounding break that came from something thick and formerly durable. He lifted his foot upward, looked beneath it and was suddenly aware of what had happened. 

Jason was what he had broke. Not Jason in his entirety, but his mask, the only face Michael had to attribute to him. The little red lines that sat under the eyes were gone, shattered into two useless slits that failed the purpose of decoration. The rest of the face, the portion he had previously kicked, fell off from the base like wet paper mache. Foolishly, for reasons he could not exactly justify, he attempted to reconstruct the mask back in one piece. He held those sharp shards as if they were the remnants of an old jigsaw. When the pieces fell away, when they clattered their way into the fresh earth and stayed there, Michael couldn’t help but feel like it was a metaphor for the grave. 

Jason hadn’t died, of course, he was merely three feet away, kneeling down in a patch of taller grass that had turned a charming lime green when the sun hit it. His back was facing Michael, those mountainous shoulders bunched up with his hands pressed inward like a clever mouse with cheese. To Michael, he looked more like the bales of hay you’d see passing through farming country, a collection of parts rather than a person. That impression changed when he saw those giant shoulders heave with a heavy breath and jerk as if hung on a dolly. To his trained eye, it looked like pain. 

Jason in pain. The thought felt extremely ludicrous. Jason was an armory, a tank,a wall of muscle and brawn. He could feel no pain and therefore could not crumple into a heap of it like some brittle and no knowledge child. Jason’s strength was his best quality in Michael’s eyes, the aspect that made him worth keeping around. If Jason wept, if he could be broken, one could only imagine what could happen to Michael. Michael who wasn’t as tall or as broadly built, Michael who had all the working parts of a measly human. How awful it was to be reminded of his own mortality, how feeble he felt to actually entertain the thought that he was the inferior monster. Nonetheless, he pushed the thoughts down like the morning pill, washed them down with more important attributes like persistence and cleverness. Two qualities he knew he had over Jason. Not that it mattered. The closer he drew, the more he got to see the mess that was once Jason, his confidence seemed more like an old friend moving away to a new neighborhood. 

 

**\- X -**

 

_ “ He is horrible, Jason.”  _

 

_ I know.  _

 

_ “ You have to kill him, Jason. He is a monster.”  _

 

_ I know.  _

 

_ “Then get up, boy! Get up and get rid of him! Now!”  _

 

_ Please don’t make me. My face. My face. You have to do it.  _

 

Even with all this mental diatribe, Jason couldn’t find the will to move his body. He was alright physically, save for some disheveled pants, but his mask was gone. He had the thought to look for it, to feel around with his eyes shut like a blind man, but doing so would require him to move his hands from his face. If it were anyone else, an intruding camper, for instance, he would show his face off like some burly weapon. People were so much more easy to manipulate when they were fearful. But this was no shaking counselor, no promiscuous teenager. This was Michael Myers. Michael who had survived a car wreck, Michael who could face everything as cooly and calmly as a jazz pianist. Michael who in some shape or form, was his ethereal duplicate. Yes, he liked to think of himself as something cut from the same cloth, something just as callous and indestructible. He had found himself saying this in the recesses of his mind on more than one occasion. He and Michael were the same. If Michael could leave this place and wander elsewhere then Jason could too. 

He wouldn’t know it, but his perseverance in saving Michael had grown from the same seed. If he lead Michael out of the woods, then Michael would lead him to the mountains or maybe out towards Philadelphia. They’d trade off somewhere in between and he would never have to worry about falling into a routine again. It was a silly little wish to have, a rambling and ridiculous connection that didn’t have much reason to it. When it got down to it, Jason knew it was his duty to stay here, his duty to protect his mother’s legacy. Michael was a distraction, a new toy that would eventually break. Regardless of this, mother was a lot more quiet when Michael was around, and when she piped down his mind was able to think about something other than her newest order. If Michael were to see him for what he truly was, if he were to truly comprehend what it was that separated them, he’d disappear. Rather if it came from rage, disgust, or pure fear, Jason wasn’t sure. 

 

_ They’re all going to laugh at me.  _

 

Michael would laugh. He would finally break his vow of silence and Jason would be that shaking, pathetic camper lying on his side and wailing. He would be six years old again, he would be a joke again, he would be the version of himself he liked the very least.  _ Weak _ . Jason thought of the time he had been at the center of the lunchroom back at camp.  Every boy and girl gathered around to throw fistfuls of mashed potatoes over him and they chanted as they did it.  _ Jason, Jason the clutz! Jason, Jason, Jason the dunce! Ten points for his gut! Five for the butt! Twenty for his big ugly mug! The _ counselors fucked in the laundry room. The camp nurse, who had always hated children, lit a cigarette and reread another section of the national news about the annual anniversary of a boy who had gone crazy the Halloween of ‘68. She would read this and come to her already preconceived belief that all children were devils. Camp Crystal Lake was a horrible place, a place where it seemed everyone was miserable and looked forward to channeling that misery out onto someone else like a viral game of hot potato. When that misery was spent, when the chanting stopped and the counselors came back in, everyone carried on as if it never happened. 

 

_ Something is on my shoulder.  _

 

It certainly wasn’t an imposing  _ something _ but it was there. Maybe a budgie or a fallen acorn dislodged by a clumsy squirrel. When it came again at a harder tempo, he realized that it was something not of happenstance but of purpose. Two fingers clenched together to a point that jabbed into his shoulder blade in a risque sort of impatient poke. In all his drama and self-imposed turmoil, he had almost forgotten that Michael was even there. In the heat of the moment, he had ceased to be Michael the creature from the car crash. He was instead merely a set of eyes that looked upon the carnie freak that was Jason Voorhees. A set of teeth that bore into a snarling grin when the lips parted to laugh. He was one of them, one of the others.  _ A certain someone who should run fast and hard when Jason found his mask again. _ However, the laughter never came, the blows somehow halted. In their place came another jab into his shoulder, this one softer and more slow. With patience perhaps. 

With the cautious movement of a hare leaving the burrow, Jason lifted his head up. Logic told him to chance a look over his shoulder at Michael, but he hadn’t the courage for that.  _ Baby steps. The slow, careful turtle wins the race.  _ Instead, he parted the forefinger and middle, creating a space just large enough for him to chance a peek. There, on grass still dewed with that morning’s new breath, was Michael. At least not Michael in his entirety, but his mask, the only face Jason had to attribute to him. In his mind, he thought it looked like the loose and whitened remains of a snake’s shed skin. It was eerily as empty, eerily as compact and natural.  Without really thinking about it, Jason moved forward to touch that ghostly, abandoned mask. As if to check if the rest of the man hadn't somehow shrunk down to the size of a cricket and was now lost in the folds of latex. This was not the case of course, but Jason still handled it as if he expected Michael to crawl out from the inside. 

 

_ Are you sure?  _

 

  **-** ** **X  -****

 

 

Of course Michael was sure, there was hardly ever a time in life when he wasn’t. To demonstrate this, he sat down on the grass and pressed his back against Jason’s. At that moment, he found himself settling into this decision as if he were running cold water over a new burn. It wasn’t exactly a happy sort of feeling permeating his consciousness, but it was one that understood sacrifices must be made in the order of common good. If there is such a thing of course. He brought his knees up, hunkered his chin and dipped his nose into the crook of his arms.

_ I’m not going to look.  _

He couldn’t say with certainty that he understood Jason’s behavior. Not completely, at least. But in a short, vagrant way he could say he could empathize. It was particularly funny because a lack of empathy had been on of Loomis’ calling card for a  _ sociopathic personality. Or was it psychopathic? Borderline something? There’s too many names for just plain crazy.  _ If it were for any consideration, he would say that Jason was perhaps a lot farther from looney that he had initially thought. The difference between a looney and a patient at Smith’s grove was that the patient acted with at least a modicum of sense. A patient could be saved, a looney needed to be euthanized. You could see yourself in other patients, little bits and pieces of shared behaviors or ticks. Looking at a looney was like looking into the eye of the needle but not bothering to fix through a thread. 

Jason didn’t like showing his face. Not entirely unreasonable, Michael didn’t like it much either. There was a purpose behind the dawning of the mask, but he had the sneaking suspicion the two of them had different reasons. For Michael, there is perhaps nothing more terrible than being looked at. It’s infuriating, in some instances. Someone looks at you and they assume they’ve got you all measured up.  _ Oh, he’s blue-eyed so he must be innocent. He’s baby-faced so he must be a sap.   _ Even Michael played this little game of guess-who, he had done it with Jason and the thought of reevaluating his assessment brought him a touch of unease. 

_ Why did Jason wear his mask? I _ t was a looming thought, but he figured if he focused on it long enough the answers would find their way to him. Perhaps that was a trait he and symbiotically picked up from Loomis, this nasty assumption that all behavior had some sort of underlying psychological purpose.

_ Michael wears the mask because he likes to disassociate his actions. He feels better about these actions when he can distance himself and put another face to them.  _

Wrong again, Loomis. All those years in that prissy English school and you couldn’t figure out a six-year-old. 

To be critically honest, Michael couldn’t give less of a damn about dissociating his actions. To him the lines between right and wrong were not blurred, they were non-existent. He quite swelly and truly didn’t care for his own humanity. It sounded mad when he thought about it, but it was true. He didn’t particularly like the idea that he had a person, a body bolted to this earth by meager flesh and bone. How many times had he looked in the mirror, saw an average looking twenty-something and wanted to wear his intestines as a boa? How horrible it is to be a person, a fickle, dreadful thing. How horrible it is to have a face that marks you as something else, hands and legs and feet that have such limitation. 

Jason had no such affliction. Even then, as they sat with their backs against each other, Michael felt no reciprocating warmth or the inhale and exhale of breath. Jason was a wall, a fortress, a lumbering figure of strength and power. _ A shape. A real shape. _ In his day-dreamy thoughts, he thought about how one goes about becoming so formidable. Is there a potion you have to drink? A surgery you have to undergo? Maybe you have to die and be brought back like Frankenstein’s monster. The thought felt a lot like romance, the soft caressing feeling you get when you tell your teacher what you’d like to be when you grow up. 

While he thought of this, Jason stood up, quickly too. It was almost as if he had been struck with an  _ ah ha! _ moment and just had to race to a pen and paper to get his ideas out. Michael stood up too but dared not to turn around in case Jason had chosen not to accept his little peace offering. He duly noted how cold his nose felt now, how his eyes naturally squinted when the light hit them. Maybe Loomis was right. Maybe the psyche feels more inclined to brutally murder when the face is hidden and Jason was just getting ready to snap his spine in two. That’s poetic irony, he was sure of it.  _ The killer gets killed by the very weapon he killed with. _ Loomis would call it the  _ just desserts. _

Luckily for Michael, he wouldn’t be getting his just desserts, the main course or the appetizer that came before it. Placed in the palm of his hand was something tubular and rough, only upon further inspection did he realize that it was that damned walking stick on its charred edge. Jason had placed it within the hollow of his palm in a short suggestion that he hold it. Michael did after awhile and held it level within his own eyesight as if he were inspecting it for tricks. Jason tapped twice on his shoulder with two fingers. When Michael turned, he did so only to see the messy mass of hair that was the back of his own mask. Jason had turned and stood there waiting for Michael to get with the program, his palms flexing inward and outward. He was wondering if he was going to get his just deserts too. 

_ I’m not going to look.  _

There was a touch of relief in seeing that, and Michael's shoulders lowered from their preparatory stance to strike. He returned the gesture of their strange little two finger prod but kept one hand collected at the back of Jason’s jacket, to tell him he was there and not planning some form of attack. Jason’s shoulders lowered also, his hands finally falling out of their curious flex and unflex. 

_ Okay.  _

_ Okay.  _

_ You’ll follow me.  _

_ I’ll follow you.  _

  
  


**-** **X  -**

 

 

There were moments passed there between the trees of the woods that looked more like swamp territory. So many trunks and branches lay in disrepair, their limbs sticking up from the earth like the hands of beggers pleading for change. It was the kind of place you’d expect to see Hansel and Gretel leaving their trail of breadcrumbs in, maybe even Red Riding Hood and her stalking big bad wolf. Michael knew in some guttural, supernatural way, that there was no place like it in the entirety of Illinois. This was the first time that he had actually entertained the idea that leaving his home state was even a possibility. Haddonfield was where he had grown up, where he killed and where he always figured he would die. Being here, wherever  _ here _ truly was, felt like some sick kind of disruption in the natural order of the universe. Michael belonged to Haddonfield the same way Jason belonged to these woods. It was almost like every city or state got its own monster, its own personal boogeyman to keep the numbers down and the kids at bay. 

Jason certainly was the monster of his camp. The way he trudged through this place, you would think he was doing so with a map beneath his eyes. Every turn was calculated, every sidestep and cross the kind of movement a local makes when he’s about to frequent the corner drug store. So when a run-down building the size of his father’s garage appeared in the close distance, Michael had no trouble believing that it was of Jason’s making. It certainly looked makeshift enough, the sides of the walls adorned with technicolor pleats of metals and woods of all kind. A crude window was on the side, but it’s wooden panes seemed only for decoration. It looked comically like one of those drawings children make when their teacher asks them to draw them a house, the shape just as rudimentary and basic. Humorously, there were four logs arranged around the front in the shape of a large square, a makeshift porch with a rocking chair pushed so far against the last wall it couldn’t possibly rock. Jason stopped before they reached the front door, casting a hand to his side and ghosting Michael across the chest. 

_ Wait here.  _

_ Wait out in the middle of nowhere? Sure thing.  _

Regardless of reservations or a crawling suspicion, Michael did what was asked of him. Without really looking to see if the coast was clear or if Michael had gotten the memo,Jason went inside and skirted the door closed as if he were afraid a housecat or lapdog would chase around his knees and escape. Or just maybe, and Michael thought about this briefly, he just didn’t want anyone to see what was inside. While Jason was inside doing god knows what, Michael took a moment to glance behind his shoulder. He half expected to see a mob gathered there like the one that formed to take away the monster in  _ Frankenstein. _ Where were those men they had heard down by the cabins? Why had they shot off their guns and shouted the way they had? Michael could understand the necessity for a swat team, normal people naturally found murderers reproachful. But to call so many and have them so heavily guarded? Well, it seemed like overkill. Michael knew his limits, knew he wasn’t exactly impenetrable when it came down to the nitty-gritty of things. Maybe Loomis had put a good word to those guys upstate, the ones with the big fancy jail cells and the electric chairs. Now that he was twenty-one, he could be tried as an adult and adults just so happen to get the worst punishments. 

There was a knock on Jason’s door. Twice along hard knuckles and a casual slide. 

Michael looked toward that provisional porch and his eyes fell upon what was perhaps the most comforting image in the world. It was his mask, lying there on its side in a crumpled but neat little heap just at the front door. He grabbed it, slipped it on and understood. 

_ You’re done now? You’re ready?  _

Michael tapped his fist on the door in the same fashion Jason had, a double tap and then slide. He was sure it was some kind of morse code, the kind of silly little scrawl prisoners of war tap out on their cells before they starve out. There was silence there on that other end, a long wooden creak as if feet were stepping on wooden planks that weren’t nailed down properly. When the door opened, it opened slowly, slow enough so that the door shifted and groaned like an old man with arthritis. Jason stuck his head out first, his attention turning from side to side before the rest of him followed in suit. 

Without his trademark hockey mask, Michael had a hard time recognizing him. In place of the mask was a large, worn and dusty burlap sack with a loose-fitting rope tied around the neck. Based on its creases and blotched stain work, one could tell that it had spent some time folded up and shoved someplace out of the sunlight. The tiny hole on the left side, the only space that allowed sight, made Jason’s eye look like the dark spot left over when the sun eclipsed. Michael couldn’t help but think how impractical it was, how hard it must have been to breathe. 

_ Hello, Michael.  _

 

_ Hello, Jason. _

 

Michael chanced a closer look, fingers carefully lifting the frayed ends of the burlap and putting them back down.

_ What is that?   _

 Jason pulled the tassels around his neck tighter so that the burlap clung to his head a bit more. Michael stepped back, almost apologetically. 

 I _’ve brought you something, Michael._

Before Michael could really examine anything further, Jason reached behind him to reveal a fishing pole and what looked like a jar of bait. 

 

_ You fish?  _

 

_ Yes, don’t you?  _

 

_ No.  _

 

_ Well, I’m going to teach you.  _

  
  


**-** ****X -** **

About a mile’s way there was a lake that rested just at the lip of another island that seemed to house nothing but trees. The mountains were farther back than that, the penitentiary just within them. By the time the had gotten to the shore, the old canoe that was once used to travel across and back again had been eaten alive by moss and reclaimed back into the water. It stuck out upon the surface now like a drowned man’s back bobbing just before it sunk. 

Twice now Jason had stopped just at the heart of the beach, but shook his head and shouldered on with a look towards Michael that had told him not to ask. He wouldn’t of course, but Michael had the feeling it had something to do with that ghost he seemed to mentally always be talking to. He thought of Pinnochio and Jiminy Cricket, the little white-lace angel that appeared beside the devil on the shoulders of cartoon characters. 

_ If I don’t he’s going to starve. What do I do then, mother?  _

That was the real conversation that was going on but Michael was none the wiser. He did his part, reminding Jason of reality with a tug on the sleeve or a pull at the collar. When they had arrived at the shore, Michael could vaguely tell that someone had been there before because an old lawn chair sat out looking toward the dock while a mason jar of dead earthworms sat under it. It was funny to think of Jason sitting here in his hockey mask and a farmer’s hat, watching the sun go down as he caught a rainbow trout he would never eat. The more he thought about it though, the less it seemed ridiculous. Really, if Jason had been here as long as he seemed to have been, what else would he do with his free time? 

Jason rounded the dock and looked carefully at the old lawn chair. He seemingly decided against it, choosing to sit on the edge of the dock with his boots dangling over the side and into the water. The intrusion of his feet cast long ended ripples that seemed to reach the far end of the lake, giving off the impression that the water had not been disturbed by any living creature since the dawn of time. Before long Michael joined him but crouched down at his side with his knees buckled. Jason fiddled with the hook and seemed to be struggling with getting the bait to stick. He fumbled and muddled, bringing the hook closer to his eye and the bait farther.

_ For fuck’s sake.  _

Michael began to wonder how long Jason had been allowed to wander here by his lonesome. He was efficient enough, sure but he seemed perplexed by the minor details of life. If they lived in a studio apartment, Michael was sure Jason would be the type to sleep with every door unlocked. The type who would forget to feed a goldfish but would still weep when it went belly up. Trying his hardest not to be harsh, Michael pulled on the stringy rope beneath Jason’s mask as he sat next to him cross-legged.

_ Look at me.  _

Jason did but not without some obvious hesitation. 

_ What? What do you want?  _

Grabbing the sharp end of the hook, Michael looked to Jason with a sense of pensiveness. 

_ Do you trust me?  _

_ No.  _

_ Good.  _

Before long the needle end went straight into the fabric of Jason’s mask. The giant immediately caught Michael’s arm with the full intention to throw the rest of him into the lake. Michael stopped immediately. Jason’s fishing pole was fixed uncomfortably to his chest, the pressure nearly enough to snap it. 

_ Stop it.  _

_ You stop first.  _

_ No.  _

Jason heard the burlap begin to split and Michael’s muscles relieved their tension. 

_ Still don’t trust me?  _

_ No.  _

Light was coming from the hole Michael had fixed, light that steadied his vision and made his surroundings a lot more clearer. Now he could see out of two eyes. It was then that Michael noticed the obvious slant in the giant’s right eye, the way the lids seemed to droop on either side. Suddenly, he understood the purpose of the mask and Jason understood the reason for Michael’s actions.  Not completely satisfied with his work, Michael backed down and released the hook so that it dangled uselessly above them on its rod. Jason blinked, seemingly mesmerized by the look of his own hand. 

_ Oh.  _

_ Now try it.  _

Jason was able to hook the bait onto the needle point with ease. When he did it, he looked back at Michael as if he had placed the stars in the sky. Michael shook his head, laced his fingers together and looked over the vastness of the lake.  Jason had caught three trout before the day started to turn to night, each time looking back at Michael for signs of approval. Michael gave it in his own way, nodding back at Jason and beheading each fish that was tossed over to his portion of the dock. They made a good team, in a way, a silent sort of two-man act that didn’t need any words or stage directions. Happy with a set task, Michael's mind wandered away from Laurie and Loomis. While they sat there and Jason cast a new line, he made a split decision that angered his mother and made her nearly scream. 

He had no intention of seeing Michael leave Camp Crystal Lake. 


	7. Better for me, Better for you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I have been absent for awhile, I apologize. I am not sure why this chapter was so hard to finalize but it was. I have a very specific idea on the ending for this, and my original one really did not allow for it. I hope you can understand. If you don't, well, I hope it doesn't change how you feel about this story. 
> 
> Cheers.

There was a time, in the not so long ago past, when the world was a scary place. He could recall being particularly frightened of the postman when he was seven and he would scream in horror when he saw their letterbox flip open. The point was the world was once that he was sensitive to the kind of things that were particularly frightening.  He could remember walking past the poster for I was a Teenage Werewolf at the cinema. His mother tried to abate him, patting his hand and shushing him in that comforting way mothers do. 

 

_ It's just a mask, Jason. Some silly little man with all the hair from his shower drain stuck to his face. He's really quite funny when you think about it. A silly man pretending to be a lion.  _

 

But Jason had failed to see the humor in it. In her fierce protection, she had unintentionally crippled him beyond belief. The world was a terribly scary place for Jason Voorhees and this was a concept that seemed to get worse with age. His was not a childhood of scraped knees or summers catching fireflies. His youth was spent in the casual vacancy of their one-bedroom apartment, his only company being his mother and her collection of dolls.

Absentmindedly, he thought of what younger Jason would have thought of all this. Michael, the police officers, the bums lying slaughtered and busted down in the girl's cabin. Furthermore, he wondered what he would have thought of mother, who was by far the most imposing figure at Crystal Lake. How would he, in all his fickleness and his worry, react to the idea that his beloved mother was now nothing more than a dried out cadaver resting over a coffee table.  Little Jason would hardly be able to connect the two as one. 

Here lied Pamela Voorhees. Once rosy-cheeked and beamy, now pallid, sunken and way past the invocation of rigor mortis. How had he not questioned it? How had he never noticed that their relationship seemed to break the bonds of nature? Sure, he was hardly the exemplar of rational thought, nor was he really a paradigm of reality. But the more Jason thought of it, the more he mused over it and peeled the layers back, he found flaws. Mother never spoke. Well, not out loud anyway.  Her voice seemed to beam from walls and empty spaces like Oz in his green room. 

 

_ And what happened when Dorothy peeled back that curtain? It was a lie. A lie.  _

 

He didn't particularly like to think about it, but the thought kept resurfacing like a rubber duck pushed back under suds. Mother was changing again. No longer the commanding force she once was, she was somehow different. Her voice, once a strong commanding force, had fizzled down to a room temperature whisper. Then, after those few hours spent lopping fish heads off over on the dock, she had become nothing more than the kind of murmur one would hear at the back of a classroom.

It was frightening, to say the least, the fear was a deep-seated dread that sat in his stomach like a large dinner. Who would he be without Pamela Voorhees? What would he do without her commanding presence? Her voice of reason, her love. The thought felt a lot like contemplating death, like standing on the precipice of a deep cavern and waiting for the go-ahead to jump. Even now, as he kneeled before her with his canvas bag-mask in his hands, Jason felt himself swallowing panic. 

 

_ Say something. Please say something. _

 

Mother’s face, forever preserved in its slack-jawed horror, seemed to look past him with the indifference and daftness of a corpse. But that couldn’t be. She couldn’t be dead, couldn’t be gone and exhumed. She wouldn’t do such a thing to him. She would never leave him. 

 

_ What do you want me to do?  _

 

Silence reigned. 

 

_ You know what I want, Jason.  _

 

_ But I can’t do that, mother. I can’t. You don’t understand.  _

 

_ I don’t understand.  _

 

There was no mockery in the way she said this, in fact, it sounded eerily like his own voice being thrown off of a cave and out towards an echo. The thought that his mind had made the response occurred in a sort of fairweather hindsight. But the implication of such a thing, the conclusion it would lead to, was much too distressing to continue. So he stopped it, chopping off its head like a freshly caught trout.

 

_ I don’t understand.  _

 

Their relationship wasn’t always peachy keen. There were many times in which mother just didn’t understand. She tried to, in her own way, but there was always some thin veil that separated them. Their gender, their ages, their mental states. Something always stood in the way of them blending into one cohesive unit, an immobile force. Jason always held a soft suspicion that his mother would have loved to have had a daughter, a miniature version of herself that was lovely and pink and just as eager to please as a son. But for whatever the reason, God had chosen to bestow on her a son, a son who had a muted desire to climb trees and make mud pies and dirty his best slacks. There were revolts, typical childish fits, but they were silenced with a casual reminder that mother knew best and loved him more than anything else. With that, he would slip back into the complacency of the cooperative child, shutting off the television before 5 and tucking the corners of his sheets beneath the bed. The world would regain its proper placing, the stars would align back into their indifferent constellations. 

 

_ I won’t kill him, mother.  _

 

From the left of him, a candle burnt down to its hilt and Jason was quick to strike a match to light it again. Mother’s sweater, dampened from its trip in the lake, smelt like the moss you’d find on the underside of a wet stone. The smell of petunias, the soft sting of hairspray upon her curls, were washed off by the stench of decay and rolled off rainwater. The nurse who had tended Michael on his drive over here had been brought into his cabin for the select purpose of keeping mother company. She had lost her legs somewhere on the treck through the trees and her white, bloodless arms now hung over the hem of mother’s alter with the limp weakness of a store mannequin. Even the nurse, dead nearly three days, still looked like a young woman with features distinct and recognizable. Mother, who had been without a grave for nearly three years, was blackened and shriveled. She looked more like the artifact of old African ritual practice, the shrunken heads that rest in museums and  _ Ripley’s _ books. It was at that moment that Jason’s mind made the final connection between the two. He was sitting in a room with two corpses, both just as immobile, both just as dead. 

  
****\- X  -** **

 

 

Almost three days had passed since the shape’s appearance. Since it had been established that Camp Crystal Lake was the site of an ongoing investigation, Jason had caught sight of the searching officers three times. At the front face of the camp, right where the sign was standing defaced, there was a barricade of more than five police vans. They bunched together like heavy sticks of wood choking a stream, their lights idling in a blue and white blur. Keeping his distance, Jason deduced that each search party consisted of about a three-man squad that spread out in every which way excluding the south that lead back into Cunnigham County’s small-town jurisdiction. They’d span several miles, going every which way across the camp but stopping about a hair’s margin from the snow-sprinkled mountains that were separated by a high-grass clearing. They would turn back about a mile from the mess hall, their designated central hub, then back to the closed over the entrance where they would switch stations and back out again. 

 

In the back of Jason’s mind, he thought the operation was rather clever. He had never seen men behave in such an organized and purposeful matter. The people he usually dealt with were usually dizzied by fear, their only concern in executing the flight or fight response. If it were not for the fact that search efforts were nearly nonexistent during the night, Jason would think himself on the losing side. They would still be at the entrance, discouraging trespassers, but their presence in the woods would be degraded to manageable groups of less than a baker’s dozen. He could dispatch a little group of three, he had done so with the help of a hunting bow an overzealous camper had left him the summer before last. If he kept his distance, if he kept his kills quiet and seemingly out of nowhere, he had just fewer bullet holes to worry about. 

 

He was given this gift of observation due to the fact that Michael seemed preoccupied after two nights without sleep. Back before the seventies had melted into the eighties, there had been a family of campers who rolled in in their Winnebago for a weekend in the woods. Their first night there Jason had skewered the mother through a tent pole and split the father down the middle with his own buck knife. Their daughter, a curly-headed blonde who just so happened to wake up at the wrong time, was the sole survivor. How she screamed when she exited that fancy trailer, her face going red up to the roots of her hair while her tears billowed over her cheeks in fat cascading jewels. Looking back, Jason thought it probably would have been more merciful to kill her, but the act just wasn’t in his nature. Instead, he let her run off into the woods where he hoped she hadn’t starved out. He told himself she was able to work past the mental limitations of her age. She would find her way to the highway past the entrance and find herself a new mother. Despite his wishful thinking, he knew it was her bones that were lying scattered out by lover’s cave. A lucky wolf’s dinner.

It was here in that roomy, white paneled trailer, that Jason decided he should “keep” Michael. His cabin, mother’s shelter, was entirely out of the question. Even though the outside of Michael’s caravan had been overcome with rust stains and trips of fallen leaves, the interior was rather preserved. With a full tank of an untouched water reservoir, the sink still worked and the toilet still flushed. The food, which had sat wrapped in crude tinfoil tombs, had spoiled and perished in the fridge the summer of ‘78. The bed, the only one in the entire space, was one of those crude and distasteful waterbeds that were so popular in that era. It even had those humourous curtain beads that jangled and clanked when you went to enter or leave. 

These beads had been ripped off of the rail when Jason went in to check on his new guest. He had slowly opened the door when not minutes later, he realized he was intruding. The air about the place was soft, the smell of stale closed off air a must that made him think of the scent pressed between old books. Michael’s mask was there, resting casually on the spole of a dishrack but the rest of him was elsewhere. Jason noted how humorous the mask looked resting squat and vacant on its makeshift stand. The nose folded inward, the deep frown turned thrice over so that it looked more like the worn folds of skin on an old veteran. Jason stepped in, stepping out of his feeling of intrusion like a raincoat. 

He found Michael eventually, or rather the shape of him. He lay curled and unmoving on that despondent water bed with various knit blankets and forgotten sleeping bags wrapped around him.  He was on his stomach and stretched outward, one shoulder hooked high upon the rise of his face so that only one downcast eye was visible. Around his head was a splay of hair that jostled over bunched up jackets that served as makeshift pillows. For a moment, for reasons not entirely rational, Jason thought him dead. He thought of mother resting in her crude shrine, her stillness, her silence. The thought that Michael was somehow of the same condition, that he was just dry and gone, was terrifying. 

Without really thinking about the possibilty of repercussion, Jason stepped inside. His feet made the old metal steps groan in agony, and it was this sound that made him freeze. Michael, who had stirred only slightly, brought his face lower into the blankets with the swift motion of a cat. From him came a fatigued sort of sigh, the kind any normal person would make upon being bothered so early in the morning. His shoulders, which were still clad in their dirty engineer suiting, rose and fell with the softest dictation of awareness. They resumed their relaxed stance between mountains of plush vinyl and canvas.  __

 

_ Not dead. Not dying. Only sleeping. _

 

With a pang of guilt, Jason stepped back down, gingerly pushing himself back out of the caravan as not to make the same sound. When he closed the door again, he did so as to avoid the resounding click the latch made when it was replaced.

He couldn’t remember the last time he had handled anything with care. It was a silly thought to have, but without mother around to correct him, he found himself moving around like the giant he so clearly resembled. Doors were often ripped from their hinges, handrails and wood trims continuously split open by an intervening machete. It was only recently, with all this turmoil going about, that Jason had thought to act carefully. Sure, he had mastered the art form of stalking from his years out in the wilderness, but never to the extent that he could chart routines. Even now he found himself continuing this little act as he placed himself atop the old and forgotten picnic chair the owners had left by a dead campfire. He had decided to keep post there, to wait for Michael to wake. What they would do afterward, he hadn’t the faintest idea. That’s just how things were with Michael. There was no routine, no direction or know how. Somberly, he found himself wondering if this was what it was like not to have a mother. 

 

_ How does Michael do it?  _

 

There was a locket his mother had given him once when he was six. He had been unfortunate enough to come down with a case of bronchitis and the peculiar shape of his nasal cavity meant that he had no choice but to spend the weekend in the hospital with tubes down his throat. Scared and bewildered, he was forced away from his mother by frustrated nurses but not before she could give him her present. It was a little trinket, a gold heart-shaped locket that held both their pictures on either side. When he was a child it was other-worldly and magical but now that his hands were much larger, it seemed small and fragile. 

 

_ This is my heart, Jason. Well, a part of it.  _

 

_ Your heart? Don’t you need it, mama?  _

 

_ No silly, mama has a big heart. This is just a piece of it. But I am giving you this piece for safe keeping. Can you do that for me? _

 

_ Yes, mama.  _

 

_ Whenever mother can’t be with you Jason, I want you to look into your heart. Mama will always be there with you if you just open up a little.  _

 

Years later, when she had died and he had naturally assumed it was his fault, he had punctured the left side with a sewing needle. Jason wasn’t there in that locket anymore. Not just because he had been bad, but because he had been ugly. Whenever he felt scared or alone, the last thing he wanted to see was that  _ creature _ looking back at him. Its ruined eyes, its dopey, lopsided grin. How comforting it was to see his mother’s smiling face staring back at him. Her rosy cheeks, her large front teeth she always used to call her  _ wabbit  _ chompers. How painful it was to relay that she was now well and truly gone, that all he had now in the world was this child’s trinket that did not even capture her full essence. 

 

He tossed it into the dead campfire. Mother was dead. Jason was grown up. It is was time for grown-up things. _ It was time to be more like Michael.  _

 

Before he really could reason what it was to  _ be more like Michael _ , he found himself on his hands and knees moving all that old ash out of the way in a frenzy. He had been in such as state that he hadn’t noticed that Michael was there kneeling beside him. Jason naturally reeled back from him.

 

_ What are we doing?  _

 

_ Nothing.  _

 

_ What are you doing? _

 

_ Nothing.  _

 

Almost supernaturally, Michael opened his palm to reveal that sad, dust-covered trinket. 

 

_ This?  _

 

Jason stared at him but slowly decided to reclaim the locket. Michael didn’t fight it, of course, he seemed much more interested in observing Jason. Still on his haunches, Michael grew closer. 

 

_ Show me.  _

 

_ No.  _

 

Bluntly Jason thought of another instance where this happened back at camp. A time when he was mocked for being such a mama’s boy and had spent an afternoon locked in an outhouse. He balled his fists but Michael gave no start, coming to his feet in a slow and methodical pull that made Jason look up at him.   _ Very well.  _ The look about him said and Jason felt something akin to the breath one takes after a long swim. Mindlessly, Michael was rummaging through the right pocket of his suit. Jason narrowed his eyes at this and waited without disruption. 

 

_ I found this.  _

 

Michael had this curious way of hiding things. Like the bandages, he seemed keen on surprising Jason or at the very least he enjoyed watching him in suspense. He jostled his closed over hands and the sound that came from them sounded like pocket change jumping in a bag. Knowing what this meant, Jason laid both of his palms upward. Fishing hooks, about six of them, came pouring into his hands. The husband, the man who had been filleted like a trout, had also been an avid fisher. He had hidden his bounty in the passenger side compartment. The best part about this was that none of these hooks were rusted or broken, and all of them differing in length. Jason felt intrigued and Michael went back to his previous station knelt beside him. Mindlessly he brought his hands up and down so that the hooks would jump. He picked one out of the many, a long one with a scooped neck, and ran his thumb across the tip. 

 

_ This is the best one.  _

 

_ Yes.  _

 

_ I will prove this to you today? _

 

_ Yes.  _

 

It was a nice thought and for a moment Jason even considered committing to it. For a moment, his mind was not on mother or the impending threat of the search party who would be gearing up for another round in a few hours. He thought instead of how he would thread this new hook into his favorite bait, the funny looking green one with googly eyes. He thought of showing Michael the baseball cards back in the adviser’s cabin. He fetched another hook from his pile, this one more stout, and once again admired its sharpness. 

 

_ You’ll use this one. I will show you how.  _

 

When he turned to infer Michael’s response, he found that he was not looking at the hooks but straight ahead. Naturally, Jason followed his line of sight and saw nothing but trees. He nonchalantly jabbed himself into Michael’s shoulder, as if to scold him, but was soon all too aware of what had caught the man’s attention.  _ Smoke. _ There was smoke just over those trees. And not the shy, kind of billowing trickle from a campsite but full on, blackened smoke. The kind dragons exhume from their nostrils, the kind you see on the news when someone just lost their home. The wind, a casual breeze from the north, blew the worst of it south so that it rose into the clouds like a maw of hair caught in the shower drain. If his sense of direction were to be trusted, and it was rarely wrong, the source was somewhere near his shack. Somewhere close to mother. 

  
  


**\- X-**

 

Michael wouldn't lie and say he understood Jason. The barrier of their communication prevented that. At the very least he could say that he knew Jason in a way that he could predict his behavior. If they were walking, for instance, a sudden stop and head turn could mean either two things: 

 

_ I've heard something. Someone has to die.  _

 

_ or  _

 

_ Look at that fat red bird in that tree over there. You see him, don't you?  _

 

Whatever the case may have been, the action was ended with a glance towards Michael. The way he did it, one would almost think that the giant was asking for some kind of permission. As if to say:

 

_ I've been good, haven't  I? Tell me so, please. Then, if you would be so kind as to tell me what to do afterward, I'd appreciate that too.  _

 

 

Regardless of the reason for Jason's dependency, Michael knew with the utmost certainty that he was not mad. Quite the opposite, really, for he had to be one of the most organized individuals he had come across in a good while.  The entirety of Camp Crystal Lake had been divided up into sections. The safe parts, the land that laid ahead of the marked X trees, were either no man's land or territories preeming with predators. Once, when the two of them had spied some bear and cub prints heading South of the outer border of the lake, Jason had marked up three trees in the vicinity with a curious oval pattern up the trunk. They had never been back there since. The point was that Jason knew what danger was and had to some extent, some incentive to avoid it. 

 

Which was why it seemed so bizarre to Michael that they would be heading in the direction of fire. Jason was invincible, sure, but fire had to be the Achilles heel to everything. He had no desire to see how Jason would fair against the cruelty of hellfire, the thought was almost enough to make him lurch. 

 

_ I don't want this.  _

 

The thought was quiet in the back of his head, but it mosied about his skull like a high note in an opera house. Common sense said to run, common sense said to go find a weapon and hide and wait. And yet, here was, staggering into a firepit that was set ablaze by God knows what. 

 

_ No. Wrong way. Wrong way.  _

 

He watched his hands move before him as if they were someone else's, as if they were a character's in a movie. They griped at the popped color of Jason's overcoat and caught the frayed edges when they were slid off with a violent shrug. Common sense, or in some cases natural instinct, raised her voice to a crescendo and for a moment, Michael thought of heading back into the woods to hide. He thought about it, even committed it to a plan, but his body seemed disconnected. It stayed on Jason's path, its pace bouncing to a near jog to keep pace with Jason's stride. 

In an instant, Michael was reminded of the caretakers who rode in with him, the squad agents who had tainted the mess hall with their presence. If this was meant to be an ambush, why it was the perfect sort. Perhaps they thought Michael was daft enough to assume that there were campers waiting there below all that smoke. He imagined them cackling and giggling to themselves as they lit the spark, looking like Fud on  _ Wabbit _ season as they placed a carrot into a snap-latch cage. Like a shark on chum, the mindless killing machine bumbles in with the false hope of a new kill. 

 

_ We won't win, Jason. _

 

In a way, he had always known he'd die before his time. Someone in some shape or form would have to take him out, or at the very least incapacitate him beyond repair. That was just how the world worked, unfortunately. He held no misconception that he was the hero of the story, nor did he look to hide behind the false pretense of ulterior motives or a revenge plot. He was just simply an irrefutably, bad. His manner of knowing was the same one that tells poets they ought to write, the one that tells artists they should paint. It was as plain as wearing skin, as casual as any language or practice.  _ I’m just a bad person. _   Jason was too and that was perhaps the best part of it. The bad guys, while fiendish and clever for a time allotted, almost always winded up dead or on the brink.  _ The woodsman chops up the wolf. The evil stepmother dances on hot coals. The witch bakes in her own oven. _  Death wasn't over the horizon. He was sure of it. But if fate had for some reason decided to be curteous, if the world was really tired of his tricks, he'd only regret that Laurie hadn't gone first.    
  


**-X-**

 

Despite his mania, Jason had thought about the possibilty of an ambush. The men of the outside were tricky, treacherous, and were fond of underhanded blows. His mind had somehow convinced itself that Michael was something fragile and for a moment he wanted to divert his efforts in putting him away. But a more pressing thought intruded the first, one that was old, archaic and familiar. Mother's voice, mother's thoughts bleeding into his. 

 

_ I'm burning, Jason. They're burning me. _

 

The voice caused such a stir in him, that he had almost forgotten Michael was there. He was reminded when he felt hands gripping at the collar of his jacket and then again by the pockets. He spared him a thought in those briefing moments, an utterance that half resembled an apology and an insult. 

 

_ Don't be stupid, Michael.  _

 

He had thought, shirking his shoulders as to relieve Michael of all this fussing. He told himself that Michael would be alright for the few moments it would take him to save the other most important person in his life. He told himself that Michael was clever, that he would hide until he was given permission to stop and that they could continue this strange relationship when he had saved the day. The bad guys, the villains, just had to be stopped once again. But he soon found himself disappointed when he caught sight of Michael in his periphery. 

 

_ We won't win, Jason.  _

 

_ Don't be stupid.  _

 

The smell in the air was suffocating. The kind of smell that lingers after the campfire has been stomped out. If his lungs were still functioning, Jason would think he was choking. From across the way, in the underbrush of trees and unmowed wild grass, the scene looked a lot like the ashen vortex of a lit cigar. Here was the smoke billowing out from the catching of stray trees and dried out bushes. Here were the smoldering remains of some metal trappings of an old car or caravan lying juxtaposed over the earth like the casualties of war and battle. At the center of it all, right where the land dipped and created a valley that looked like the punctuated end of a semicolon, was Jason’s shack. From the windows, one could see flames rising up and outward with wavering fingers and arms. The smoke, black and well fed on the sheets and furniture that laid inside, wafted up and out towards the countryside like a bad omen. 

 

_ Mother. Mother is in there.  _

 

Jason wasted no time in making his way down towards the slope that would eventually lead to his home. He did not stop to think of the cause of the blaze, which had honestly been accidental, nor did he think of the possibilty that the firestarter could still be nearby. His consciousness was just barely able to register a rustling in the bushes not ten feet away. These bushes, which were pine-needled, rested comfortably away from the shack and adorned the convexity of the valley like polka dots on a dress. If he were to look closer, if he were to sharpen his vision just a tad, he would see the gleam of a pair of aviators resting over the grated barrel of an automatic. 

 

_ I was right. I knew I was right.  _

 

Michael stopped midstride, his intuition ringing every bell and alarm it had stockpiled in his head. Usually being right was a wonderful feeling, an ecstasy no drug or stimulation could replace. This wasn’t the case at the time, as strange as it sounded. Here being right meant correctly predicting bad news. he felt like one of those silly little fortune tellers you’d see in the movies, the squat old ladies with the purple turbans and crystal balls. 

 

_ Stop. You have to stop.  _

 

Intuitively, he knew Jason wouldn’t stop going down into that death trap. Although he had no capability of understanding his reasoning, he could empathize with the drive. In a way, he was the same way. If it were Laurie sitting there baking in that inferno, he’d have about ten times the urgency to get down into the valley. It was not for love, of course, he was incapable of that sort of intricacy, but there was an understanding in him that told him that there are forces in this world that are stronger than reason. In his own quiet sort of way, he understood that this was Jason’s  _ Laurie _ , the objective he just had to complete. He told himself he gave up, that he washed his hands of the situation and would just have to leave Jason to die. Despite all this, despite his insistence that he was simply above it all, he did not listen to instinct. Instead, he clung closely to the trees, moving about them with the careful quiet of a python in the sand. 

****\- X  -** **

 

 

Funny how these things happen. It was he who had decided to go out to survey that sad little shack twenty paces back. It was he who had knocked down the candle that set alight the table cloth and so on and so forth. How he hadn't noticed the fire was beyond him, but he certainly noticed it when his teammates were twenty paces back and swore it was Myers playing his usual tricks. There he was now, playing dumb and pretending that the fire was indeed some kind of game orchestrated by Haddonfield's boogeyman. 

 

Who knows, maybe the madman liked the thought of fire and would come out to dance around it like some sort of midnight worshipper. Make his job a lot easier too. 

 

His job was simple. He must capture Michael Myers, bring him back to its facility and make sure he never sees the light of day again. That what his training had been all about, after all, those seven odd years he had spent from college back again and then out. Absently,  he began to wonder if it was all worth it. The pay was nothing substantial and he had barely enough saved up from his last check to buy Allie that wedding ring he promised her. They were engaged but he had only done it with a box. A small box of crushed velvet and even smaller dreams. 

 

Would he be able to do it? If he caught Michael Myers, would he be given that salary he was promised a year ago? Oh, but what if there was a book deal too? A press tour, yes. _ I caught Michael Myers. Yes, that was me. I pulled the trigger, I sent that bastard back to hell. _ Who would play him in the movie? Robert De Niro would be swell. No someone more handsome, someone younger. He thought of Brad Pitt, Pacino or maybe even Cruise.

 

So lost was he in this thought that he had barely registered the body walking itself across the scope of his rifle. It was large, hulking and seemed to have no face. Myers, that was Myers. As he angled the gun, as he felt the metal dig into his cheek as he took aim, he let his tongue flick despondently over his lips.  _ Ah, what does caviar taste like?  Do they really have fountains that spout chocolate and is fondue anything like nacho cheese?  _ He was ready to shoot, ready for fame, ready for something other than his sad two-bedroom apartment and his even sadder fiance. 

 

A hand went over his face, the uncalloused palm just large enough to wrap around his jaw while the thumb nearly punctured his eye. The knife in the right of his breast pocket, the pretty switchblade that his father had given him upon his belated graduation, was missing.  When he found it again, it had lodged itself cleanly into the spout of his brain stem and then again under his skull. There should have been pain but the entry was so quick and fleeting, he had not the time to register it. Calvin, his partner not three feet away, gasped but he was silenced by something hard and guttural.  Before death took him, before he had the common sense to ask if it was Jesus he'd be meeting, he found himself slumped over the same tree he had taken a piss on not twenty minutes before. The last thought he had before the lights began to dim and the forest began to smear: 

 

_ What happened?  _

  
  


**\- X -**

 

The doorframe was made of oak, the tables and lounge chairs makeshift driftwood with a cloth thrown over for good measure. It wasn't much, Jason knew, but it was his. Something he had made for himself, something he had done by himself. Watching his little corner of the world burn left him with a sense of dread he couldn't exactly describe. It was the horrible knowledge that he would have to start over, rebuild and reconstruct with some tool he had long ago misplaced. That was what was most frightening, after all, the idea of finality. This concept that something or someone was truly over with. 

 

"Freeze! Hands up!" 

 

That was a man's voice behind that bush, a sturdy, bleak and meager sounding thing that hardly meant much of anything. There was a second sound too, something louder, sharper, metallic. A gunshot. The round ended up somewhere in his shoulder blade, rocketing around the bone there like loose change in the dryer. Had his brain been less preoccupied, Jason would have noticed the dynamics behind a shot like that. It was a shot meant to maim, to disarm, not to kill. By the time the second shot came, he was already halfway toward the makeshift porch. The heat was unbearable. On his skin it felt like the mugginess of summer from underneath a Christmas sweater. Lively, but tamed, threatening, but vaguely intriguing. 

 

_ If I burn long enough, will I die?  _

 

One way to find out. 

 

**\- X -**

 

Michael knew better than to assume he was quick enough to stop every bullet from hitting Jason. What he could do, at the very least, was cut the number of enemies down to a manageable number. There was a name for this particular job, this monotonous task of working by impulse. _ Cutting the fat. S _ imple as pie, sweet as cherries.  Of course, it wasn't nearly as simple as he had hoped. Cutting the fat off of this steak would be like going in with a butter knife and teaspoon. It was do-able but time-consuming, something he wasn't entirely fond of. 

 

"--awahh!" 

 

That was the sound the last guy made right before Michael had the good grace to put him out of his misery. Another saw this effect, shouted  _ eyes on Myers _ , and started shooting.  Dead SWAT members make wonderful body shields. During all of this, Michael had just enough vision to catch Jason crossing into his front porch. The feeling the sight gave him was something akin to hunger. A pain in his stomach, that heavy weighty sort of feeling you get when you've had too much too eat. It hurt, but not terribly so. Disappointment, perhaps. But he hadn't the word to name it as such. Perhaps Dr. Loomis was right when he made the assumption that Michael turned all his emotional uncertainty into rage. For he was feeling it now, horrible hot anger that felt good to release in a jab to a man’s esophagus.

 

_ Slam. _ Into the tree.  _ Crash. _ Under his feet. For a moment Michael had forgotten about Jason, but only briefly. Yes, he would be just fine without that big galoot weighing him down. It felt good to be independent again, free. All this was well and good to think right up until he felt that bullet whiz past his ear, shredding the latex of his mask.   _ Fuck.  _

 

"--die, motherfucker! Die!"  

 

Finally a worthy opponent. Michael had half the mind to rush at whoever it was who was stupid enough to bumrush him from the trees. He was fully committed to the action of a new kill, making every move necessary to make his joints move and his body hitch. There was a problem, however. It took him a moment to register it but he felt something hot and warm dash down the front of his right leg. Spitefully he thought of the patients back at the sanitarium who would piss themselves but quickly fought against it. His ears rang too, the high pitched sort of whine you get when the radio is not on proper frequency. 

 

"--you fucking devil--you--" 

 

He had just barely registered the fact that he had been shot when the second bullet came, this time in the shoulder. There was pain, but he told himself he could fight through pain. His fingers grasped for the weapon he hadn't known he lost, his arms lumbering to the front of him like a classic zombie. It was his hip that had been taken down, he could feel it collapse from his weight. When he went down, he went down hard. Hard enough to jostle off the shredded remains of his mask that seemed to have been split. 

 

_ Exposed. I am exposed.  _

 

The man who had shot him said something in a muffled gruff, but Michael hadn't the mind to catch it. His attention, wavering but strangely vigil, was on that burning shack, not twenty paces south. The way he landed made it impossible to look anywhere else. From his position, the shack looked like the open maw of an angry dragon that had jagged pieces of wood for teeth.  The roaring was just as mystic too, the sound of it turning the ringing of his ears into a deftone. 

 

_ Jason.  _

 

There was none. At least there wouldn't be if that fire still went on. A part of him wanted to crawl over to that shack, to investigate it for his remains for proof of destruction. It was a stupid thought, even stupider when he realized the pain that came from movement.  _ Target disengaged _ . That's what the man had said. Before Michael blacked out, before his vision failed, he had just barely enough time to register his latest thought. It was a feeling of disappointment, a feeling of vague disbelief. A feeling like being dropped from a very large height. Last thought he had before a very rude and unwelcomed hand pulled him by the back of the collar. 

 

_ Why?  _


End file.
